PREVIEW Foam Magazine Issue #15 Construct

summer 2008 / #15 www.foammagazine.nl

Melanie Bonajo Thomas Demand Moira Ricci Toshiko Okanoue Martina Sauter Myoung Ho Lee

NL/IT €12,50 E € 14 AUT €16 DE €20 Dkk 150 PTE CONT €14

foam magazine #15 / construct

editorial / contents

Editorial

Marloes Krijnen, director Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

The power of the medium of photography lies in its ability to capture in a fraction of a second part of the reality that surrounds us, which can then be reproduced and distributed. A gifted photographer has the talent to select a situation at precisely the moment when form and content coincide with a creative vision, in an image that moves, unsettles, surprises or questions.

Some photographers choose not to go out into the world in search of images that speak to them. Instead they are themselves responsible for the creation of an image, which is then recorded in a photograph. They create their own picture by using other media, such as sculpture, painting or performance, or by combining existing photographic material into a collage.

This makes photography either an end product, capturing a created reality, or a starting point from which other, entirely new images can emerge.

In this issue of Foam Magazine, the international photography magazine published by Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam and communication agency Vandejong, we look at work that features a reality constructed by the photographer, in which photography is the medium that records that reality and presents it to us. Under the title ‘Construct’ we present six extremely ­diverse portfolios, with photographic work featuring either actual structures in space or photographic constructs in a flat plane. In an era when it is possible to conjure up any conceivable image by digital manipulation, we have deliberately chosen work in which the construct takes an analogue form.

One portfolio comprises work by Moira Ricci, a young and talented Italian­ photographer who ingeniously inserts herself into old family photos. The ­resulting montage is a visual anachronism in which Ricci plays a subtle game with time, place, and her relationship with her family history. The work of ­Melanie Bonajo is representative of a group of young Dutch photographers whose approach is quite different from that of many of their compatriots in the field. Spontaneity, perversity, freedom, and a predilection for absurdity and surrealism, often with a slightly tragic undertone, are all characteristic of Bonajo’s work. Myoung Ho Lee from South Korea intervenes in the landscape in ways that are simple yet on a grand scale, part of a strong photographic tradition. Martina Sauter is a talented German artist who creates photo­graphic collages in which two different images adjoin or overlap. Elements of film noir, a clever use of space and games with plot make her work thoroughly original and throw a new light on old film icons. Thomas Demand’s meticulously ­assembled and photographed paper sculptures are often described as ­‘constructed realities’. This description applies equally well to the story that lies at the root of ‘Embassy’, whose leading figures are an Italian reporter, ­Niger’s Rome embassy, the CIA, Saddam Hussein and a quantity of enriched uranium. We also present a selection of collages by Japanese photographer Toshiko Okanoue, created between 1951 and 1956. Using material taken from Life and Vogue, she constructed surreal images of life in a different reality.

Alongside the portfolios, this issue of Foam Magazine features, as ever, an interview with a prominent figure in the cultural world. This time the ­interviewee is Sunhee Kim from South Korea, who currently lives and works in Shanghai, China, where she is the art director of Bund 18 Creative Center.

From 1996 to 2002 she was chief curator of the Gwangju Biennale. She ­describes cultural developments in China, the position of photography there and the country’s relationship with the West.

We are also particularly proud of our regular feature On My Mind..., in which people from the world of art and culture describe a photo that has preoccupied them of late and explain why. This issue also includes the ­latest programme of exhibitions at Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam and a short book review section.

Contents

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On My Mind...

images selected by

Frits Gierstberg ~ Rattan Chadha ~ Kenneth Montague

Alison Nordström ~ Alec Soth ~ Martin Parr

Pages 016 - 021

Interview with Sunhee Kim

Asia De-Orientalized: Sunhee Kim Reconstructs Bund 18

by Lisa Movius

photographs by Ruben Lundgren

Pages 022 - 026

Construct:

Theme introduction

Construct

by Marcel Feil

Pages 027 - 034

portfolio: Melanie Bonajo ~ (Our) Nature has no boss

text by Merel Bem

Pages 035 - 054

portfolio: Thomas Demand ~ Embassy

text by Chrissy Lange

Pages 055 - 070

portfolio: Moira Ricci ~ 20.12.53-10.08.04

text by Giulio Piovesan

Pages 071 - 090

portfolio: Toshiko Okanoue ~ The Miracle of Silence

text by Mika Kobayashi

Pages 091 - 110

portfolio: Martina Sauter ~ Double

text by Stefanie Kreuzer

Pages 111 - 130

portfolio: Myoung Ho Lee ~ Tree

text by Jim Casper

Pages 131 - 150

Photobooks by Sebastian Hau

Pages 152 - 155

~ Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Malick Sidibé ~ Chemises

Foam Exhibition Programme

Pages 159 - 172

Melanie Bonajo ~ (Our) Nature has no boss

Thomas Demand ~ Embassy

Bonajo’s images are like spells, mystical acts which originate from an endlessly effervescent fantasy or are used to shape the world to fit her own viewpoint, to make the world comprehensible.

Embassy consists of six different views of the spaces in the embassy of the Republic of Niger as Demand remembers them, providing the first photographic component to the story of a theft, ending with a war.

A Trait Angel, 1954

Visit in Night, 1951

Moira Ricci ~ 20.12.53-10.08.04

Toshiko Okanoue ~ The Miracle of Silence

Moira Ricci is everywhere. She is present in all her artworks, which is hardly surprising. The puzzling thing is that she is a photographer and a video-artist who does not seem to take any pictures or shoot any video­ at all. Her artistic process is less like a songwriter’s and more like that of a music producer or a dj who remixes new versions of old songs.

Since the late 1990s the photo-collage works of Toshiko Okanoue have been ‘rediscovered’ through exhibitions and in publications. Her works have gained recog­nition for their importance to postwar photography and the surrealist movement in Japan. Her works had been buried in oblivion for nearly forty years, largely because of the course her life took.

Martina Sauter ~ Double

Myoung Ho Lee ~ Tree

The pleasure of observing, together with the emotional implications of being a spectator, are the themes that pervade all of Martina Sauter’s work, imbuing her images like an all-embracing law that subverts the conventional view of everyday things with suspense.

Simple in concept, complex in execution, Myoung Ho makes us look at trees, one at a time, in their natural surroundings. He isolates each tree from its immediate environment by presenting it against an immense white canvas backdrop, creating in effect, a temporary monumental outdoor art installation.

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foam magazine #15 / construct Six well-known figures from the cultural world selected an image that has recently been on their minds...

On My Mind...

Berlin Ost, 1985 © Seiichi Furuya

Frits Gierstberg There are some photos you never forget. I’m not thinking of the media icons everyone knows but of images you cherish for one reason or another. You have a personal bond with them, as if they are old friends.

Although you don’t always consciously think about them, they resonate in the background. They may be triggered by another picture, one they resemble, thrusting aside all present-day images to appear before you again as clearly as ever.

This photo works like that. It’s one of the most beautiful and moving portraits I know, taken in 1985 by Japanese photographer Seiichi Furuya.

The woman in the photo is Christine Gössler. She was Furuya’s wife and together they had a son. There is a tragic story attached, but that’s not the point. What intrigues me is the way her look, full of emotion, is able to touch me. I never knew her, yet I feel there’s a bond between us. Entirely imaginary, of course, since a photo is simply a piece of paper with

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a few marks on it. Perhaps it’s the golden light falling on her face and the wall behind. She is standing in front of a reproduction of a famous 1857 painting by Millet entitled ‘The Angelus’. Millet gave an everyday scene a religious atmosphere which can be sensed in the photo as well.

Furuya took portraits of Christine and their son every day, along with still lifes, nature photos, cityscapes and interiors. This stream of diverse images demonstrates the extraordinary power of photography to evoke a vibrant sense of life. + Frits Gierstberg is Head of Exhibitions at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in ­Rotterdam. He studied art history at the University of Leiden and his articles on photography have appeared in international publications. Gierstberg is Special Professor in Photography at the Faculty of History and Arts of the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

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Bedroom from the Urban Myths series, 2004

Rattan Chadha Hiphop music and culture are the key influences in Luis Gispert’s work, and his high-gloss fashionable appropriation of pop genres provides a rich framework for his art.

I love the fantastical and the surreal in Luis Gispert’s photos. I also love their settings, which are based on Western religious art, particularly the art from the Baroque and the Renaissance.

Gispert makes his photographs on site with the locals, incorpora­ ting elements of their experiences and backgrounds into his surrealistic narratives, the ‘tribal portraits’. He thus creates a fictional version of r­eality that mirrors our own.

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A typical photograph of the young Cuban-American artist in my collection­ is the one named ‘Bedroom’, which shows a woman in a traditional ­wedding dress, opulently decorated with gold lace and thread, sitting on the edge of a bed in an old-fashioned room. With hands folded and an upward gaze, she appears to be in a state of devout meditation. In front of the woman, yet unacknowledged by her, floats a large boom- box with multiple speakers. In this photograph, Gispert once more mingles ­language and subtext of various cultures. + Rattan Chadha is the ex-CEO of Mexx and a collector of contemporary art.

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Notting Hill Couple, 1967 by Charlie Phillips © Charlie Phillips / www.akehurstcreativemanagement.com

Kenneth Montague The context for this powerful image is as follows (from ‘Notting Hill In The Sixties’ by Mike Phillips):

‘When the Caribbeans began to arrive in the fifties and early sixties Notting Hill was still depressed and underdeveloped – a massive slum, full of multi-occupied houses, crawling with rats and rubbish. The people who lived here were poor, and they were competing for jobs and living space with whites… who, like them, were at the bottom of the ladder, young couples with children, or poor families…’

And yet, in this intimate portrait I see something totally different.

When I spotted this image recently on the cover of a reggae album in London I was immediately struck by the direct gaze, the protective arm, and the obvious love between this young couple – at a time when their very relationship would have been considered an act of defiance, a dangerous public statement. Although I live in Canada, like many Jamaican immigrants my parents and relatives also experienced the dagger-like stares, the lack of respect, and the harsh treatment associated with the fear of the unknown.

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At this moment, we are experiencing a resurgence in the exploration of issues of immigration and identity – mostly due to the current election in America, where Barack Obama (who happens to be the product of a mixed-race relationship) is trying to become the next president. The global media and art world is currently obsessed with a discussion of race, and this image could be analysized forever within that context – but what I see is that this couple is simply in love. + Kenneth Montague is a collector, curator and director of Wedge Curatorial Projects in Toronto, Canada. He recently published the catalogue FLAVA (available internationally through d.a.p. books / artbook.com), celebrating ten years of his unique projects exploring black identity throughout the Diaspora. Selected works from the Wedge Collection will be part of an exhibition planned for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit (MOCAD) in the spring of 2009. www.wedgegallery.com

foam magazine #15 / construct On My Mind...

Unknown photographer, Chinese, not dated. Collection of the author

Alison Nordström On weekends in Beijing, Panjiayuan Market offers the detritus of a hundred complex and turbulent years. Foreign tourists haggle over porcelain, metalwork, posters from the Cultural Revolution, and fake Tibetan antiques. I keep my eye out for photographs, of which there are never very many; it has not been a friendly century for pieces of paper or the memories they might have preserved.

In a shabby frame backed by ill-fitting wooden boards are six photo­ graphs on colored patterned paper. Four appear to be professionally made; two may be snapshots. One, of a young man, dressed in Mao ­tunic and trousers, is labeled in Chinese that translates ‘West Lake, Hangzhou, souvenir photo, 1965’. The only other picture with writing on it reads ­‘Beijing Eternal Light Photo Studio’. In it, an older woman on a folding metal­ chair, two young girls and a toddler face the camera before a painted­backdrop. The other pictures are similar: a man and wife with a child, a baby on a park bench, a man seated awkwardly on a low fence in a park, three girls in padded jackets posed in a stiff row. I cannot read any of their faces.

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It strikes me that whoever made this owned only one frame; it was possibly the household’s only decoration besides an obligatory image of The Helmsman. I am curious about the man whose face is obscured. I wonder what this object meant when it was treasured, and what it means now in its strange new home. + Alison Nordström is the Curator of Photographs at George Eastman House ­International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York, the USA Director of the Ryerson University M.A. Program in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management, and the USA editor of the new academic journal Photo­graphy and Culture. She has curated several hundred exhibitions, is widely published, and holds a PhD in Cultural and Visual Studies.

foam magazine #15 / construct On My Mind...

Eros Haogland, published in The New York Times, 2008/03/16 © Eros Haogland / The New York Times

Alec Soth My enthusiasm for photography is normally reserved for full-scale projects – for books or collections of images - rather than specific ­individual pictures. I’m too worn out by the daily media barrage to keep my eyes open to the singular image. But occasionally one of these ­brilliant little fragments penetrates my defenses. This happened recently­ with a front-page picture from The New York Times. This photograph by Eros Haogland depicted an Iraqi refinery official arrested for skimming profits. My appreciation of the image had nothing to do with its journalistic­context. In fact, when I tore the picture out to hang on my studio wall, I folded it in such a way as to crop the American soldier out of the background. Without the soldier and accompanying text, the bound and blindfolded businessman could as likely be from New Jersey as Iraq.

His desk, tie and chair are utterly generic. The fact that we don’t see his eyes makes him even more universal. Stripped of context, he becomes a kind of everyman for middle-management corruption. Bloated and alone, I imagine he lives inside most of us. +

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Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Alec Soth has received fellowships from the ­McKnight and Jerome Foundations and was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His photographs are represented in major public and ­private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Walker Art Center. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney and Sao Paulo Biennials. His first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004. The follow-up to his widely acclaimed Sleeping series, NIAGARA, was published in 2006. He became an associate member of Magnum Photos in 2006. In 2007 Steidl published Dog Days, Bogotá.

foam magazine #15 / construct On My Mind...

Penelope Umbrico, “For Sale / TVs From Craigslist”, 2008, courtesy LMAK Projects, NY

Martin Parr One of the pleasures of attending photography festivals is that it gives us a chance to discover new photographers and artists. ­Having just ­returned from the first New York Photo Festival, my personal discovery­was Penelope Umbrico who was selected by Lesley Martin for her show entitled The Ubiquitous Image.

Umbrico finds images from different sources on the internet like Flikr or Craigslist and e-catalogues and then orchestrates the found images into projects. One such raid was a work entitled ‘ForSale/ TVs from Craigslist’. For this piece she copied the home-made still lives of TVs for sale, all featuring the reflection of the flash on the TV screen.

These are then blown up to the TV’s real life size and framed, and hanged together.

The cumulative effect of all this is quite wonderful. The gadgets that pump a constant stream of images into houses all look redundant, almost sad. They are entirely transformed by Umbrico’s actions.

Quite what this means is up to the viewer to try to work out, and all of

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which becomes part of the method and is why this work is so engaging.

Umbrico adds a further conceptual twist by offering to sell her images, at the correct television size, and the first image of each TV is available to buy at the same price as the TV was listed on Craigslist.

The buyer has the job of working all this out and contacting her dealer to see if the TV is available. The prices range from $1 to $ 400. +

Martin Parr is a world-famous photographer. Several books have been ­published of his work. Besides a photographer Parr is curator of numerous photography exhibitions and an important collector of photobooks. He received widespread acclaim for the book ‘The Photobook: A History - vol1&2’ which was co-edited

by Gerry Badger. In recent years, he has developed an interest in film-making, and has started to use his photography within different conventions, such as fashion and advertising. Martin Parr is a member of the MAGNUM photo agency since 1994.

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interview

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interview

Sunhee Kim Asia De-Orientalized: Sunhee Kim Reconstructs Bund 18 interview by Lisa Movius ~ portrait by Ruben Lundgren These days contemporary art is becoming ever more a luxury good, the province of auction houses and speculators and an exclusive elite. That holds true particularly in China, where contemporary artists have gone from underground iconoclasts to commercial superstars in a few dizzying years, their works now hotly traded commodities. As the gap between the gilded rich and everyone else continues to widen exponentially in China, Korean curator Sunhee Kim aims to bring the country’s art back down to earth, and back to public accessibility. Attempting to do so through the medium of the Bund 18 Creative Center, a nonprofit space located in an upscale luxury retail and nightlife complex, just adds to the challenge.

‘Our aim is to reduce the distance between art and living,’ is how Kim ­describes the mission of the center, which first opened in 2005 and ­reopened last fall under her direction. ‘While I was still working in other countries I ­realized I was serving a certain class of people. It is fun to talk about art and artists, but I realized all of my friends are collectors and curators,’ she mused.

‘When I was little, I wanted to help more poor people­, but now I just help rich people. In Africa, Iraq, they don’t much need art; they need food and weapons. We try to make art for the masses, but here we are: still for the rich or the limited few. But people with low incomes can also enjoy art.’

Kim believes she can draw upon her outreach experiences from Japan, Korea and the US to introduce them to the Chinese art world.

She argues that public interaction is crucial to a healthy art scene, ­especially for the pampered hothouse flowers that many Chinese ­artists have become. She tries to get the middle class public in through accessible exhibitions, free entry, long hours and publicity campaigns.

Bund 18 is also in the process of closing one of its luxury boutiques to free up space for an affordable design and museum shop administered by the Creative Center.

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Public outreach remains in its infancy in China, and so far most efforts have proven stillborn. But that is only one of the ambitious aspirations the Creative Center is pursuing, although the others are more conceptual in direction. It aims to become a hub for contemporary Pan-Asian creativity, but the broadness and diversity of the massive continent evades coherence. Even when more narrowly defined as Northeast Asian, Kim’s preferred term, cultural differences remain more conducive to ­disparate voices. The center also tries to bridge the gaps between art and design by showcasing a mix of the more standard painting, photo­ graphy, and video with installations of, say, furniture design, such as a May show by Korean designer Ha Jihoon.

Sunhee Kim herself is fairly comfortable in definitional murkiness.

She studied art history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and worked as an independent curator in Korea and the US during the 1990s.

She spent six years at Korea’s Gwangju Art Museum and Biennale, and then was chief curator at Japan’s Mori Museum from 2001 to 2006. All along she has visited China frequently, forging strong ties with artists and institutions, including her Creative Center predecessor, TaiwaneseAmerican curator Victoria Lu.

In 2006 Kim was recruited by Shanghai’s Zendai Modern Art ­Museum, a private museum owned by local property tycoon Dai Zhikang.

Accustomed as Kim was to international professional standards, rather than the fairly haphazard and connections-driven operational style of the Chinese, her stint at Zendai was rather a baptism of fire.

‘I was at Zendai for one year, and got to be part of the opening of this big beautiful museum. When I arrived, I had a whole plan, but it just didn’t work there. My plans were for curatorial, PR, education, design. I was very disappointed; I thought they didn’t understand me, but actually­ I didn’t understand them. So I quit and started researching Chinese art more thoroughly. I have always been writing about Asian Contemporary Art, but without China it is only half.’ >

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~ ‘The most fascinating thing is that the meeting of the ­contemporary with China brings amazing results.

No one could have expected what is happening now.

It is unique.’ ~

Her time at Zendai was eye-opening as Kim came to realize that its infrastructural shortcomings are universal in China. ‘Museums here are not functional, at all. Here in China, it is all open, with no expectations. To ­other countries, this is crazy. Here, they create a new model. .Museums in China have educational problems, they lack public outreach.’ She mentioned that twelve years ago she worked to develop programs at New York MoMA that allow the blind to appreciate art through the tactile. ‘Museums now and for the past ten plus years in the US have been doing amazing ­programs. But here, they don’t have them at all. I don’t understand this. I scheduled things, wrote proposals. Even with school programs they have not caught up. At Bund 18 I’m still trying to do them.’

‘It is only an example. It is only the beginning stage, the history of the contemporary art museum is still very short; China needs more professionals, more people coming from abroad and working in China.’

Now in her second year in China Kim stressed ‘Just visiting China is very different from living here. Very, very different. Chinese art is the ­hottest right now. When I used to visit for a few days, going to studios, I would just see the good works, the positive side, whereas living here, I see more of the facts, the good and the bad of Chinese art. China is considered the biggest country, the oldest country, but actually in terms of modernity it is the youngest country. Deng Xiaoping’s open policy is still only 30 years old. The infrastructure is very new here. Young means not mature, especially the system. Then there is the Sino-centric idea that is very special to China, even in the art world. They really need more communication with the outside world.’

Despite the endemic structural problems, Sunhee Kim remains ­enthusiastic about the Chinese contemporary art that lured her here in the first place. ‘China is only just starting to use the technology of video and photography, but already it is amazing and very different, and is starting to get exposure. In Korea and Japan we call China a continent.

Korea is very small, and Japan is a small island. China for us is huge.

China is extreme: in the bigness, the color, the way of expression, and this includes photography.’

She cited as an example Hai Bo and his before-and-after group portraits. ‘His idea itself is quite unique, and still expresses big changes.

After twenty years, he returns and shoots the same people, but the men have almost all died, so the shots go from ten people to just a few. But the women are all still around. Seeing the same people, it says a lot about the history of China and how it changes.’

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She pointed to Wang Qingsong and Hong Hao as examples of ambitious, expansive scale, using people and objects respectively. Another­ is Liu Wei’s buttock mountains, which appear to be traditional Chinese landscapes but upon closer inspection can instead be seen to be ­naked human bottoms. ‘A lot of them are using Chinese history and icons and topics and changing them. The distinctive Chinese method is approach plus scale - whereas Japanese and Korean artists work more individually.’

It is perhaps too early to assertively assess how China fits into and is altering Pan-Asian contemporary aesthetics and art, but that it will do so seems certain. ‘The most fascinating thing is that the meeting of the contemporary with China brings amazing results. No one could have expected what is happening now. It is unique. I am very happy to see how this thing becomes so Chinese: extreme, varied, unique. Western and Chinese cultures mix very well. China just needs more time to mature and to fully develop.’

Kim maintains that the mixing and adaptation of Western culture defines Asian contemporary art.‘Modernization has meant Westernization­ in Asia, even in art. At first there is a learning period. Japan was the first to adopt Western art. East Asia’s tradition is in ink painting. The art of the modern age is more turbulent, and Japan adopted it a hundred years ago. At first they were all the same, trying to copy from Western art, which generally meant oil painting. It was strange to them at the time, using oil and water-based paints. However, they tried to adopt and adapt materials­ and ideas, and eventually it was no longer strange, it became very comfortable, like clothing. We all wear Western clothing now without even thinking about it.’

‘ Western photographers have been the strongest so far. Each ­period has its emerging ideals, and now it is the Asian age. The dominant voices­ remain Western, but strong ones are starting to come out of Asia now.

The emotion and thinking is still very individual. It is amazing what comes through their lens. Take for example Arata Nobuyuki, whose work is very noisy, with strong images compared with Hiroshi Sukimoko who is more mathematical and silent.

‘In China the artists are working on the same themes, focusing mostly on social changes in the country. Korea and Japan don’t do that any more. On the personal level, the Chinese artist are in a way expressionists, while the Japanese try to hide something through art. The ­Koreans are always in the middle somewhere.’ >

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interview

Cellphone shot by Ruben Lundgren

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~

‘China is only just starting to use the technology of video and photography, but already it is amazing and very different, and is starting to get exposure.’

~

Kim suggested that exploring and developing art through a regional r­ather than national frame offers promise as well as pitfalls, arguing for a Eurasia ideal: ‘For example, on a clear day we can see Japan from ­Korean high rises.’

‘Asia is everything, from A to Z. The Middle East has absolutely ­nothing in common with us here. But we are all Asia. East Asia feels like Asia to me, because we share Chinese characters, and a lot of other ­common things, like similarly shaped traditional buildings. We share an intellectual heritage, as expressed in painting, architecture, clothing. I love India but it is not our regional community, so to me it is exotic. Here I can pass as a Chinese. Asia is a huge thing, a key to the peace of the world. Asia is very important, and has great diversity.’

Kim believes the predominance of white Westerners in the global art world contributes to a defensive sense of Asian solidarity, adding that conferences she attends are 90% white. While this imbalance results from and represents the background of contemporary art, it combines with the current vogue for the art of third world countries like China and India to create some troubling structural imbalances, such as fueling and celebrating orientalized exoticism in those countries’ art. ‘To come to China for one week and look around and find artists or organize a show is wrong, and makes me sad. Artists in China and in Asia play the power game. They know how to make themselves famous. But is the most ­famous the best art? I don’t think so. Westerner curators and museums look for the exotic, for the Chinatown that is there only for tourists. Their audience is foreigners.”

Kim advocates better dialogue between institutions as a solution.

‘I feel there’s a big gap. Westerners don’t understand the roots of the East. For example, in Los Angeles you might see people wearing a t-shirt with the character ‘ai’ (love) on it, but upside down or missing a few strokes. Their knowledge and understanding is very shallow.’

What is more problematic, she maintains, is how that limited ­understanding is shaping the art here. ‘In common with Korea and ­Japan, China relies too much on Westerners as their consumers, and Western tastes ensure that certain more clichéd artists will sell well. Artists here rely on Western ideas and institutions, on the precept of the Western curator coming here and finding Chinese artists and “making them great!” They spoil Chinese artists.’ Meanwhile, the local structure ‘is still inferior. For example, there are few Chinese collectors – most are investors, not collectors. It is very sad and disheartening.’

Also absent in China are professional media and criticism.‘Bright lights make big shadows. Chinese artists are so spoiled, they have no critics keeping them honest. Here, many artists hate the very word critic. The Chinese art bubble needs to be criticized. We have to be ready for it to pop.

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‘I don’t much like 798; it is like a one-stop souvenir shop. I support what is raw and young, plus collaboration with universities and art schools to better serve the artists and the public. But I get depressed, it is hard to make artists move forward. Contemporary artists in China have become great public icons, so they have a great public responsibility. They should not be like entertainers, but more like creators of literature, exploring humanity’s good and bad sides. It is a pity that many famous artists are just entertainers.’

Nonetheless, beyond the expensive paintings by big names, the prospect of emerging photography, new media and design in China keeps Sunhee Kim excited. ‘I think Chinese art that uses technology is still in development. Japan and Korea still generally make better use of IT. ­China is still mostly painting, and photography is just starting. While photo­ graphy is still the strongest media in China, the number of Chinese ­photographic artists remains comparatively small, but they will be great, very great and very soon. I only know that technology is advancing amazingly here, which means photography will too. It is exciting, waiting for the next gadget – and the art that will come with it.’ +

Originally from California, Lisa Movius studied in Beijing in 1997 and moved to Shanghai in 1998. As China’s, and particularly Shanghai’s, contemporary art and culture went from bratty toddlerhood to awkward adolescence, Movius observed it all – and herself grew up alongside it. She has for the past decade dedicatedly documented Shanghai’s art, rock music, theater, film, history, architecture, design, business and society for publications around the world.

Ruben ­Lundgren (1983) usually collaborates with Thijs Groot Wassink (1981) under the name WassinkLundgren. They met at the Utrecht School of Arts where they graduated in 2005. They have been working together since, making work described as conceptual documentary.

Early projects are Stadtrundfahrt and Shanghai Forest (both 2005), both

publications dealing in a humourous way with human control of nature. Other projects questioned the medium itself. Like the tearbook WassinkLundgren Is Still Searching (2006) where they made the final selection after all the books came back from the printer by tearing out the pictures they disliked. The booklet was included in the selection of best books of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

In 2007 they published the award-winning book, showing Chinese scavengers

picking up bottles the photographers had placed in front of their cameras. Instead of prints the initial exhibition in Foam Photography Museum (Amsterdam) showed all the pages of the book framed seperately. The publication won the prestigious Prix du Livre for Best Contemporary Photobook at the Rencontres d’Arles Photofestival 2007. In 2008 it was nominated by Thomas Weski, curator of Haus Der Kunst in Munich, as best photobook of 2007/2008 at the Kasseler Fotoforum.

Currently Thijs groot Wassink is living in London where he is studying for an

MA in fine art at the Central Saint Martin’s. Ruben Lundgren is doing the same at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

For more information see www.wassinklundgren.com

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theme introduction

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foam magazine #15 / construct

theme introduction

Handspiegel, 2007, light jet print, 33 cm x 45 cm

~ ‘Even more than staging, constructing has connotations with craftsmanship and things being made by hand.’ ~

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foam magazine #15 / construct

theme introduction

~

Construct ~

by Marcel Feil ~ curator Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Considering the works of contemporary photography that one is apt to find at the many art fairs and the prices that are being asked and paid for them, and considering the role that photography plays within both the current discourse on art and the more general debates on our current, image-based culture, the conclusion seems inevitable: the medium­ of photography has emancipated itself over the past several decades to become a fully fledged and accepted form of art. The question of whether photography is an authentic art form lies far behind us now, as do the often fierce arguments that proponents and opponents used to present on that topic. Just as it is impossible now to imagine our daily life without photography, it is hardly likely that the medium will give up its place within the future development of visual art.

And yet there are still moments when one can sense a fundamental distinction between the world of photography and that of the arts. There is any number of artists in whose work photography plays an essential role, for example, but who nevertheless feel very uncomfortable when they are labelled as ‘photographers’. The way they see it, the simple fact that they make use of photography does not automatically make them photographers. The mere medium is apparently far less of a determinant in that regard than the more substantive aspects of the work, a method that is used, the artist’s influences, allusions, education or mentality.

There is evidently still a difference between those who consider them­ selves to be artists most of all and those who are photographers.

Especially the way in which photography is used seems to play a major role in the reasonably generalising distinction between art and photo­ graphy. Many ‘real’ photographers, for example, primarily make use of a quality that is intrinsic to the medium of photography: the ability to record in a fraction of a second an image from the visible reality that surrounds us, to reproduce that and then to distribute it. To arrive at such an image, the photographers will venture out into the world and are largely dependent on whatever might happen to take place before their eyes. The ability to be in the right place at the right time and to recognise and capture that moment is characteristic of many successful photog­ raphers. Obviously it helps if the photographers also happen to know

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what they are looking for and are able to combine a certain degree of visual and mental orientation with their own vision on what they shoot­ ing and with their own signature. In such cases, a photographer might actually force the image, and the act of searching becomes an act of finding. There are countless examples of photographers who are so moved by a particular situation or image that they simply know at a certain point: ‘This is it. This is what I have to take a photo of.’ How such a photo is then captured – whether intuitively, in a ‘split second’, or only after extensive preparations – is something that varies from photo­ grapher to photographer and translates into the ultimate result. But aside from a recognisable signature and the authorship of the maker, the crux of the matter remains their dependence on what took place in front of their eyes and thus in front of the camera.

This is much less often the case with much of the photography that can be seen at art fairs and in galleries and museums for modern art.

There, instead, one is far more apt to find the work of photographers who wanted to retain the greatest possible control over the representation in the end – a form of control that often extends through a number of definable steps from the initial conceptual phase to the ultimate form of presentation. In many such cases, one could say that the image has been constructed. The intrinsic and visual diversity that such constructed­ images can assume is enormous: from theatrical mise en scènes to minimal abstractions, and from contemplations on the medium to digitally­ created pseudo-realities. In general terms, the difference ­between ‘photographer’ and ‘artist’ is often determined by the difference between ‘image taking’ and ‘image making’.

Granted, there is little new about the complete construction of a photographic work. Indeed, ever since the very beginning of photography, those who have sought to record something by means of photography have determined every last detail of the scene – even if for no other reason than that the long shutter times of the very first cameras required that things should remain motionless for a long time. This made it advis­ able for the photographer to control things as much as possible. From simple still lifes to countless theatrical, narrative images from nine­ teenth-century Pictorialism: all are examples of staged, and thus con­

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Silhouette, 2006, light jet print,100 cm x 158 cm

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Feuer Kristall, 2007, light- jet print, 136 cm x 180 cm

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~ ‘A constructed photographic work, analogous with the art of painting, becomes a semantic complex built from readable signs.’ ~

structed, photography. And yet these belong to a very different, more painterly tradition than that to which much contemporary constructed photography belongs. The latter is much more apt to be indebted to the many innovative uses of photography that appeared between the two world wars of the last century, especially within Surrealism and the van­ guard of Modernism.

Many Surrealists used precisely the alleged veracity of photography to depict their dreams, anxieties and obsessions in such a way that there would be a tension between delusion and reality. Certain theatrical mise en scènes of Man Ray come to mind, for example, but also the work of Hans Bellmer, who used photography in a well-considered way to record his fetish-like dolls. To arrive at an artistic end product, Bellmer used a violent combination of his unsettling sculptures and photography’s ­capacity for representing them. Both the dolls themselves and those photo­graphic representations attest to a visual construction that makes an immediate yet complex appeal to the relationship between the eye and the mind.

The influential photographic experiments that took place within the ideologically imbued Constructivist movement of the 1920s were also often characterised by a convergence of a range of media. In con­ trast to much Surrealistic photography, nearly all these experiments were done on flat surfaces, such as photo collages and photomontages.

In the process, the artists made much use of the possibility of playing the different forms of representation off against each other within a single image. El Lissitzky’s famous work The Constructor (now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York) is an excellent example of that. Judging by the mention of his name in the upper lefthand corner, the work is a self-portrait and shows Lissitzky’s head with one eye noticeably highlighted. An image of a hand holding a pair of compasses has been superimposed over his face by means of a double exposure. Besides the pair of compasses, there are also other refer­ ences to constructions, including engineering paper and various typo­ graphical elements. All in all, the image is built up of no fewer than six different shots, with Lissitzky the photographer (the eye) and Lissitzky the draughtsman (the hand) ultimately merging into a single image. With very few precursors, Lissitzky worked with the concept of reality as a construction. In that he was inspired by the (utopian) idea that the social order, too, could to a large degree be constructed.

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Remarkably, it was not so much photographers, but for the most part primarily visual artists with often very diverse backgrounds who first recognised and expanded on the abundance of possible uses of photo­ graphy as a medium. In the 1960s and ’70s, for example, ‘performance artists’ very often used it to provide tangible and lasting evidence of their individual performances. Only a handful of people were present when Chris Burden did his performance ‘Shoot’ in 1971, for example. As the story goes, a friend of Burden’s shot him in the arm with a .22 calibre rifle during the event. The only tangible evidence for that, however, were the scars on Burden’s arm and a few photos that had been taken after the shooting itself. Photography was increasingly being used in those years to record such performances, and as the physical traces of the individual performances became less permanent than Burden’s scars – think of Vito Acconci’s shaved head or Dennis Oppenheim’s sunburnt chest – the photograph as a registration of the event would only grow in importance. So much so, indeed, that it later also came to be valued as an artistic image in its own right, and there was a reversal in the appre­ ciation for the physical action towards that for the stationary, lasting image. It was a shift that is also visible in the development of the work of many artists. Although they began as ‘performance artists’, Gilbert & George, for example, spent more and more time making large composite photographic works in which their own physical appearance enters into relationships with both text and other photographic images.

In those years, a growing number of artists also began using their own bodies, with the express goal of making photos of those. Photo­ graphy was no longer first and foremost merely instrumental in registering­an action. Rather, the action – the theatrical mise en scène – was done to help facilitate the ultimate photographic work that the artist had in mind. For some 30 years now, Cindy Sherman, for example, has been manipulating her own body by means of make-up, clothing and prostheses. With her mise en scènes, she comments on the cultural and social stereotypes as she finds those presented in magazines, advertise­ ments, films and classical paintings. There are countless examples and imitators of this kind of role play and this use of one’s own, physical self, ranging from the surrealistic and sexually charged photomontages of Pierre Molinier to the recent work of Yasumasa Morimura.

Nearly all such forms of constructed photography make use of ­reality constructed by the artist – and which also actually exists or has existed as a spatial, three-dimensional reality – with the sole objective of being photographed. Photography merely records the realised struc­ ture and is the end result of a creative process that usually involves a number of phases. With constructions that have a basis in visual reality, three phases can be distinguished. First of all, there is the search for a suitable image. Here it is also possible that, just as in much ‘straight photography’, the image suddenly and inescapably presents itself to the artist. We might call this phase the studium, after Roland Barthes. Then there is the phase in which the image is transformed into an architec­

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tural structure, a scale model (as in the case of Thomas Demand) or a theatrical mise en scène (as with Sherman and Morimura). Next there is the recording of the created reality: Barthe’s punctum. The reference to existing images, and thus also the struggle with the unrelenting force of historicising through the translation of the original into a new construc­ tion, often gives such work a highly melancholic undertone.

Countless, too, are the constructed images that in no way refer to any existing visual material, or even to any existing reality. In the ­Netherlands, for example, a group of more or less independently operating­artists in the 1980s had in common that they all constructed a completely self-contained world in their studios by means of decors they had put together themselves along with any number of attributes and much cutting and pasting, and then they went on to photograph those. They were concerned not with imitating the existing reality, but rather with creating an alternative, imaginary reality. For them, just as for the Surrealists two generations before them, photography heightened the tension between fantasy and reality. The work of these artists was in no way uniform, neither in terms of the content nor visually. There can be no greater contrast than that between the melancholic universe of Teun Hocks (a monograph of whose was recently published by Aperture in New York) in which the maker presents himself as a sort of ‘Everyman’ in situations that are always as absurd as they are tragic, and the ­baroque, exuberant work of the young Erwin Olaf.

Erwin Olaf has developed into an internationally renowned artist who, in his more recent series, has been concentrating more and more on painstakingly staged, photographic works in which location, models, styling and digital postproduction all ensure a completely controlled and often complex total image. This work and the filmic approach have many more connections with the sort of photography known as ‘single framed narratives’ (Olaf has also made several films) than with the subject of both this text and this edition of Foam Magazine. Olaf’s staged work – or that of Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson or Anthony Goicolea, just to mention a few of the many other names – obviously also involves a certain ­construction. But the result is achieved by means of a mise en scène with real people and a real location with the goal of making a situation that, though artificial, is nevertheless recognisable and realistic – as if it could have been just so. They are photographic simulations. In contrast to staged photography, constructed photography does not bother to present the situation being portrayed as if it could actually have happened, and there is no subtle toying with fact and fiction. The crux of constructed photography is that fact of a construction, a deliberate and visible ­making of something. Even more than staging, constructing also has connota­ tions with craftsmanship and things being made by hand, with the ­actual putting together of something by means of old-fashioned, analogue ­cutting and pasting – whether this might lead to a spatial construction to be photographed or to a collage of all kinds of photographic material directly on the flat surface.

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This way of working means that the maker him or herself is more present in the final result than in many other forms of photography. The often transparent approach, whereby the viewer can often see not only that there is indeed a construction, but also even how that construction came to be, enables one to mentally follow a way of working and as it were to ‘read’ the image. As the image undeniably communicates that there is a maker of the representation portrayed, one can assume that every ­visible element present in the image is deliberate. In other words: nothing is there without a reason. In that way, a constructed photographic work, analogous with the art of painting, becomes a semantic complex built from readable signs. By looking at the total representation, the viewer becomes aware that it is a construction built up of many building blocks.

He or she is seduced into an active, ‘readerly’ kind of viewing in which the representation is first deconstructed in order that it can be ­mentally reconstructed once again following the example of the original maker. It is here, besides in the deliberate visible construction, that the core of the artist’s presence lies, and the confrontation with the constructed work becomes above all a meeting with its maker. Perhaps that explains the growing number of chiefly young artists who seem to be returning to analogue, constructed photographic works. Precisely in an age when the perception of reality is being determined foremost by heavily­digitised media, there seems to be a need for a different experience than that of speed, technologising and detachedness – both in the creative process of the maker and in that of the viewer. For them, art remains above all the work of humans. + On the photographs accompanying this text.

The work of Alexandra Leykauf (Nuremberg, 1976) is based on a theoretical ­approach to photography and focuses on the way in which photographic images function. She is primarily concerned with a visual analysis of the often complex relationship between depictions and representation, between context and meaning and the process of perception. She most often makes use of found visual material where the depiction refers, directly or indirectly, to the calling up and viewing of images (theatres, reflections, shadow plays, etc.). Leykauf either transforms these images into large panels that are then placed as objects in a space or manipulates them in ways to suggest such a sense of three-dimensionality in the photographic work as to jar the perception. Alexandra Leykauf is represented by Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam.

All images: © Alexandra Leykauf, courtesy Galerie Martin van Zomeren

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Melanie Bonajo (Our) Nature has no boss

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Melanie Bonajo

Melanie Bonajo (Heerlen, 1978) works as an artist, performing and exhibiting her photographs in major art institutions such as Institute Neérlandais, Paris; Museum Kröller-Möller, De Hoge Veluwe; SMBA, ­Amsterdam; Van Zoetendaal, Amsterdam; Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Foam, Amsterdam and a solo show at Fette Gallery, Los Angeles 2008. In addition to numerous exhibition catalogues, a book showcasing a retrospective of her work will be published in September 2008 by ­Capricious Publishing. Together with Kinga Kielczynska she is working on the ­continuation of the ‘modern life of the soul’ publication which will be printed in 2009 by Veenman Publishing. She won the Dutch Young Artist Award for 2003 and in collaboration with Kinga Kielczynska won the Pup

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Award 2007. Her work has been published by Capricious, Eye-magazine, Glu, Livraison, Famous magazine, Mollusk and many more. Since 2004 she is the Creative Editor of Capricious, the photo magazine for young emerging photographers..

All images: © Melanie Bonajo, courtesy of Rotwandt Gallery, Zurich and ­

Fette-Gallery, Los Angeles

Merel Bem studied Art History at the University of Amsterdam. She is a freelance art and photography critic, writing regularly for the Dutch daily newspaper De Volkskrant, CBK Noord-Holland and ArtReview.

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Melanie Bonajo

by Merel Bem

The greatest show on earth is performed daily at home. An exclusive performance with front-row seats, free of charge. There an arm dis­ appears into a trouser leg; a leg slips into the sleeve of a jumper. A ­cardigan is turned round on the back to form a lumpy appendage just below the neck. Pieces of clothing lose their original function and take on a new one, seemingly all by themselves. A pair of underpants lands on the head, creating a fairly charming cap. Sock becomes mitten, ­jumper becomes scarf, shirt becomes skirt.

Few things are more entertaining than watching a small child trying to get dressed. It’s inspirational too. In fact, every fashion designer should spend fifteen minutes a day watching such a dressing session – it would certainly be a good way to come up with new ideas.

Does Melanie Bonajo have vivid memories of herself as a small child?

Likely. When we look at her photos we see adult bodies twisting themselves into all kinds of childlike shapes. A woman kneels on the ground,

I Have A Room With Everything, 2000 © Melanie Bonajo

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tied to a stepladder and a duster. She wears a bucket on her head and has her hand in a watering can. Another woman has a jumble of chairs on her. Heads are replaced by pillows, a face pasted over with passport photos­. A man stands on his head against the wall, red-faced but smiling­.

Look at me, he seems to be thinking, I haven’t done this in years.

Melanie Bonajo (Heerlen, the Netherlands, 1978) is first and foremost a photographer. She was educated as such at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, from which she graduated in 2002. She has amassed an impressive CV of both Dutch and international exhibitions, and she contributes photographs to magazines such as Capricious, ­Glumagazine and Zoo. From a technical point of view, her photos often are ­ingenious constructions. But there are times when Bonajo doesn’t give a fig about photo­ graphic perfection, about light or composition – then she just records what there is to see, what she has built or installed.

Her work includes elements of performance and installation art, as does that of many of her colleagues who studied at more or less the same time. Her working method shows a kinship with that of Eva-Fiore ­Kovacovsky (1980), Jaap Scheeren (1979) and Anouk Kruithof (1981) – as well as others. These photographers take the visible world as their ­starting point, but add something extra, each in their own way of course: it’s a kind of psychological layer which ensures that the reality of the visible world is recognisable but at the same time this world seems as if it’s ­being dreamed. In other words, these artists deconstruct the perceptible world bit by bit, in order to build it back up again from their own

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­ erspective, so that it looks the way they experience it. In this new world, p recognisable subjects and situations may suddenly acquire another whole function and meaning, often with a lightly absurdist undertone.

Even when the inspiration for a photo series is documentary, as is the case in one of Bonajo’s latest projects, she still maintains control over the ‘reality’ she encounters in her own unique way: she manipulates and kneads it until it reaches the desired playful, dream-like form. ­Bonajo worked on the project The Modern Life of the Soul (2007) with the Polish artist Kinga Kielczynska. In the forests of eastern Poland they discovered­ a community completely isolated from modern society, a community which believes that human beings descended from plants. Their ­eco-friendly way of life is determined by the rhythm of nature. Bonajo’s photos show people covered with plants, blending in with their surroundings like chameleons. Small altars of candles and flowers pay homage to nature and the life it creates.

Furniture Bondage 12, 2007 © Melanie Bonajo

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This cult and the way in which it reveals itself blends seamlessly with earlier images generated by Bonajo. The objects she fastens to women’s bodies, the strange positions she’s had her parents assume, the different­ colours she gives to the faces of each member of a family – the ­images are like spells, mystical acts which originate from an endlessly effervescent fantasy or are used to shape the world to fit her own viewpoint, to make the world comprehensible.

This way of working really has much in common with the way a child discovers its world and learns how to master it. Bonajo also dismantles, directs, builds and designs. She constructs installations; she gives performances that are reminiscent of primitive rituals. She creates her own iconography, her own symbols, as if she doesn’t yet know what the rules are in the grown-up world – or as if she simply doesn’t want to know.

The anecdote that Bonajo once told during an interview is very revealing in this respect. It was a story from her youth, and it went as follows: ‘When I was a child, I was terribly restless. I never wanted to go to sleep. My parents tied me to the bed to try to get a little peace, but I still managed to escape and I ran around with a mattress on my back and half the bed attached to my body.’

The 2007 series Are All Clichés True? was created in part from those memories. The series features naked women’s bodies with all sorts of objects sticking out of them – ironing boards, bicycle wheels, paint ­rollers and fans – like extensions of or even accessories to the physical body.

Some have attributed a strongly feminist subtext to these images – and

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perhaps the photos could be interpreted in this way: an indictment against still-prevailing sexist notions, and the woman who is then literally­ tied to these. But if that were true, if these photos really were meant as an indictment of (Western) women’s oppression – to speak in sweeping terms – then they wouldn’t be nearly as good. You could perhaps think that Bonajo intends the cliché-like nature of the images as an ironic­ ­interpretation of the project’s title, but that expression has in fact lost much of its power.

It seems more likely that in staging her images Bonajo is searching for the point at which she is no longer credible. In other words: where her audience no longer will put up with what she constructs, because it is simply so outrageous that almost no-one can relate to it. Because it’s all right for her to exhibit a childlike openness, but when it comes right down to it she can hardly claim to be just a snot-nosed kid who doesn’t know any better. That would attest to a boundless naivety. Bonajo thus balances adroitly on the edge between cool artistic skill and breakaway absurdism. And she’s able to bring it off.

In fact, until now she has always succeeded not just in holding her viewers’ attention, but in gaining their understanding and empathy as well. The situations depicted in her photos may not match the viewer’s

own personal feelings but Bonajo manages to portray them in a ­playfully recognisable way, even in photos of non-human subjects.

The photo of a cuddly toy seal watching a real seal in a tank is a simple­ image, but is still extremely moving because nearly everyone thinks they know how that fuzzy seal feels: full of longing for a life he’ll never have.

This is a typical example of a photo that is actually too childish­for words and even a bit kitschy. But Bonajo gets away with it. She just takes that photo, and it assumes an important place in her oeuvre. We accept that.

And in the meantime she makes subtle reference to the rather larger themes that occupy her adult mind, such as what she views as runaway consumerism and our usually skewed relationship with nature, proving that Melanie Bonajo is firmly in control on all fronts. +

List of works (in order of appearance): p.01: Robbie and I, 2001 p.02: Cloud 03, 2004 p.03: My Dad Loves Beetles and the Beatles, 2003 p.04: Vision Quest 01 (in collaboration with Kinga Kielczynska), 2007 p.05: Multi Colorful Society, 2007 p.06: Liberation from Form 03, 2006 p.07: Furniture Bondage 07, 2007 p.08: Huh?, 2006 p.09: Monday Morning, 2004 p.10: Furniture Bondage 03, 2007 p.11: Reappearance of Dawn (in collaboration with Kinga Kielczynska), 2007 p.12: Personality Crisis 05, 2001 p.13: Do You Know Vic?, 2005 p.14: Lessons from My Father: If You Feel Depressed Stand on Your Head For

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a Little While, 1999

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Thomas Demand Embassy

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Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand was born in 1964 in Munich, and studied at the ­Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich from 1987–89, at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1989–92 and completed his MA at Goldsmiths’ ­College in London in 1993–94. He has had solo exhibitions at several major ­institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt.

His work is included in the collections of major institutions worldwide.

In September 2008 his work will appear in the Gwangju Biennale.

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Christy Lange is a writer living in Berlin and is Assistant Editor of frieze.

Her writing also appears in the recent publication Stephen Shore, ­published by Phaidon Press.

All images: © Thomas Demand, VG Bild Kunst 2008

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Demand’s Embassy

by Christy Lange

At number 10 Via Antonio Baimonti in Rome, an orange, green, and white striped flag hangs over the fifth-floor balcony. Though it resembles a faded Italian flag, it is actually the national flag of the Republic of Niger, and the apartment belongs to the country’s Italian embassy. Few ­people, other than the occasional journalist seeking a visa and the representatives employed there, have been inside this unremarkable office. But on New Years’ Eve 2000 someone broke in and, curiously, stole a watch, a bottle of Bulgari perfume, and some embassy stationery. The world showed little interest.

Six years later, Thomas Demand arrived at the same building to find out how this nondescript embassy of an impoverished African country ­became embroiled in some of the most dramatic political events of the last decade. Demand’s journey to the embassy began when he read the July 2006 article in Vanity Fair by the American journalist, Craig Unger, breaking the story of the significance of the embassy break-in. Unger’s in-depth investigation chronicled the events from start to finish, bringing­ to light their unlikely importance on the world stage. After reading the article, Demand saw a particular connection between his own work – photographs of re-creations of the sites of current and past events,

which the artist builds out of cardboard and paper – and the paper trail that began with a few stolen pieces of stationery and ended with a war.

According to Unger’s account of events, the documents taken from the Embassy of Niger in Rome were used to forge contracts that implicated Saddam Hussein in an apparent attempt to buy yellowcake, or enriched uranium, Niger’s only significant export, and to bring it to Iraq, presumably to build nuclear weapons. These spurious contracts circulated on the international political and intelligence circuit - from the Italian ­military secret service to the CIA and eventually to the desk of President George Bush, who had long been seeking to prove the existence of weapons­of mass destruction in Iraq. Here, on a piece of paper from the ­Embassy of Niger in Rome, was the proof he needed.

The photographs of the reconstructed embassy in Demand’s 2007 series Embassy show what could be any other unkempt administrative office. At its entrance, a brown door is double-locked; an inner doorway is adorned with a portrait of the country’s leader and flanked by the flag of Niger; inside, a desk is covered with papers which no one has ­bothered to place in stacks - the accumulation of what must be years of ­unopened mail or letters awaiting responses. Folders are stacked on shelves, a fax machine gathers dust, a coffee cup may or may not contain today’s ­coffee. Somewhere in that hurricane of papers might be the letter that Demand mailed to the embassy, requesting permission to meet with the Ambassador about the possibility of photographing inside. His two ­previous attempts to visit in person, under the guise of wanting to obtain a tourist’s visa for a non-existent aunt, had failed. When those attempts didn’t work the artist sought the advice of the few journalists who had covered the story. Eventually he received a letter on embassy stationery granting a short meeting.

Poll, 2001, 180 x 260cm, C-Print/ Diasec © Thomas Demand, VG Bild Kunst 2008

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The yellowcake contracts on stolen letterheads, after evaluation by the CIA and the FBI among others were repeatedly dismissed as ­obvious forgeries; names were misspelled, dates were inaccurate and the details of the supposed yellowcake transaction were logistically i­mpossible.

Nevertheless, as George Bush was preparing to give his State of the ­Union address to the nation in 2003, his speech-writer, citing the documents, inserted a now-infamous sentence into the President’s ­address, stating that the letter confirmed that Hussein was seeking to build weapons­of mass destruction with the help of yellowcake from ­Niger.

Those forged letters were used as the ‘smoking gun’ that Bush needed as justification for invading Iraq.

In early 2007 Demand stood where it had all started, in the waiting room of a banal office in Rome, surrounded by official emblems and ­papers and a portrait of the President of the Republic of Niger hanging above the doorway. The images Demand created of this place from memory are the only photographs of the site of the theft available to the public. No journalist managed - and the police did not bother­- to photograph the scene of this petty crime. Demand’s work frequently­involves extensive image research and he often travels to locations to make his own photo­graphs of a place before recreating it in his studio; but this case

required him to adopt the strategies of an investigative journalist. Most of the ­reporters who originally covered the story were reluctant to talk to him about how they obtained access to the embassy. So how could he, an artist with no experience as a detective or an investigative reporter, get inside to photograph it? He considered several ­options, including an ­unlikely story about wanting to travel to Niger. He briefly even considered a bribe. Eventually he settled on the truth; ­bringing with him some catalogues and explaining that his project about the Embassy would be shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale. As Demand recalled his encounter with the consular representative who finally agreed to meet him: ‘I am led into a darkened office which consists of two connected rooms. The blinds have been lowered because of the sun, and the ­florescent lights are on. In the corner of the back room sits a small man on a chair with a cup of coffee, strong cigarettes and a telephone on the table in front of him. He waits there and asks in French what I want from him. I attempt to explain to him in German, English and horrendous ­Italian [...] I ­discreetly look around, attempting to imprint the objects in the room on my memory­. I notice the fax machine is the same one I have.

The envelopes on the extravagant tables have an official, pale color and look as if they’d never been opened [...] He picks up the catalogue and looks through it. I explain to him that it is a catalogue of my exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He opens it and I see that he has doesn’t have a clue what he’s looking at. This is a good thing, since I don’t actually have to explain to him what I’m intending to do: make a life-size model of his ­entire office, including the chair in which he is sitting, out of cardboard [...] He closes the book and says, to my ­absolute shock, in fluent English: “The republic of Niger does not have any interest in what you do, please leave this room.”’ >

Kitchen/ Küche, 2004, 133 x 165cm, C-Print/ Diasec © Thomas Demand, VG Bild Kunst 2008

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But Demand had been there long enough to commit the details of his surroundings to memory, enough to recreate them in life-size environments in his studio in Berlin. Embassy consists of six different views of the spaces in the embassy as Demand remembers them, ­providing the first photographic component to the story of the theft. But ­Demand’s version, rather than being an accurate reproduction, is ­instead a ­muted view, devoid of details but nevertheless imbued with the essence of truth of the place that he saw in his few minutes there. While a ­journalist would be obligated to document the scene as ­accurately as possible, and to describe the events and the details ­exactly as they appeared or occurred, Demand, unbound by those constraints, could create the scene from memory. Then he could ­recall it again once removed, sculpting­ the room itself, and the objects ­within it, out of paper and cardboard – estimating the sizes and shapes of the things he could ­recall, configuring the ­papers as he remembered them, and removing the people from the scene. But there are no short-cuts here: the ­papers occupying the desk that ­Demand created are in fact cut to A4 size from larger sheets of Demand’s own paper stock, and carefully placed on the desk to look like they’ve been left there. The envelopes and folders that scatter the office are not prefabricated­; rather, Demand cut, ­folded and pasted them out of larger sheets of paper. Oddly, this painstaking paper­work carries a faint echo of the blank sheets of bureaucratic stationery which were turned into ­‘official’ documents.

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Two previous works by Demand indirectly relate to the Embassy series: Poll (2001) depicts the provisional vote-counting station in ­Florida where paper ballots were recounted and inspected by hand, to determine the results of the 2000 US Presidential election, eventually leading to George Bush’s election as President. Kitchen (2004) recreates the tiny hovel where Saddam Hussein hid from American authorities - it shows the makeshift stove and sink he used before he was pulled from his ­hiding place by US soldiers. Each of these seemingly unremarkable ­places that appeared, reappeared and then disappeared from the news, is made slightly more permanent in Demand’s recreations. The strange alterations of reality that his photographed models give us are analogies of the alterations of reality performed by the media publication of ­images of crime scenes, and, even more fundamentally, of the alterations ­performed by the photographic medium itself. Demand’s worlds are more than once removed from their origins; rather, they are approximations of already inaccurate attempts to record the facts of a particular place.

If there are those who feel that the events leading to the Iraq War amounted to a crime, then Demand’s Embassy series is one possible crime scene. While it doesn’t come close to showing the enormity of the war itself, it brings to light the hidden and prosaic administrative ­spaces, those small seemingly insignificant deviations from the law, the seemingly banal paperwork, and the bureaucratic operations that can stack up to something much more substantial than just paperwork. +

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Moira Ricci 20.12.53-10.08.04

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Moira Ricci

Moira Ricci (Italy, 1977) studied photography at the Brera Academy and the Bauer School of Photography in Milan. She is working in the field of photography and video, and by basing her works on her own experiences­ and emotions her themes of family relationships and identity are often universal. In 2000 she was awarded the first Riccardo Pezza prize, ­organized by the Museo della Fotografia Contemporanea (Milan). She has participated in several group exhibitions since 2001, VideoRom 2.0, ­Milan, The Rising Generation in 2003, Visioni Dall’Interno in 2004 and ­Photocells in the Italian Cultural Institute in London, 2005.

In 2006 she had a solo show at Artopia in Milan entitled Interfruit.

This year Ricci has participated in a number of international group ­exhibitions: Talent Latent, Scan Photography Festival in Los Angeles, A

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Snake on a Tree and Location 1, both in New York. Moira Ricci lives and works in Milan and Grosseto.

All images: © Moira Ricci

Giulio Piovesan was born in 1974 in Venice. After graduating in English language and literature in 1999 he took up travelling and photography.

When he realized that the world would be better without his pictures he began writing about photography. He became editor of the Italian ­edition of Photo Magazine, now discontinued. At present he is a freelance journalist working with photography. Among other magazines he contributes to the English Next Level.

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Photographs: Moira Ricci

by Giulio Piovesan

Moira Ricci is everywhere. She is present in all her artworks, which is hardly surprising. The puzzling thing is that she is a photographer and a video-artist who does not seem to take any pictures or shoot any video­ at all. Most of her works, like Ora sento la musica, chiudo gli occhi, sento­ il ritmo che mi avvolge, fa presa nel mio cuore, Loc. Collecchio, 26, and 20.12.53-10.08.04 are conceptual pieces in which the young Italian artist­, born in Tuscany in 1977, makes use of footage and pictures taken by other­people. So her artistic process is less like a songwriter’s and more like that of a music producer or a dj who remixes new versions of old songs. In Ora sento la musica we see her dancing when she was fifteen; the real author of this short biographical movie was her mother. Loc. Collecchio, 26 is made up of many pictures of her home before it was renovated, onto which Moira has glued her portraits of herself taken at various stages­in her life. Again, it was not Ricci who pressed the shutter­.

20.12.53-10.08.04, a work still in progress, is a collection of portraits of her mother, many of which were shot before the artist was born. So what sort of artist is Moira Ricci?

Her work is conceptual rather than focused on the aesthetic value of her production. Like Nan Goldin, Richard Billingham and Ryan McGinley­, she makes her own life the axis around which all her creativity revolves

A Lidiput, 2003 © Moirra Ricci

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-­at present she is planning a musical about her inability to decide where, how, and with whom to live. Where she differs is that she does not focus on sex or drug dependency, poor social milieus or youth gone wild. She candidly admits that when she was a child she was much loved by her relatives and their friends. And now, as a young woman, she leads a happy­life and is meeting with artistic success - Ora sento la musica was chosen for a January 2008 exhibition at Location One’s Project Space in New York. Her obvious affection for her own family is reminiscent of works by Juergen Teller, Annelies Strba, Elinor Carucci, Mitch Epstein and Larry Sultan. In fact, she looks at the rooms of her family house and her mother, whose presence can be felt in all her artworks, with a mix of nostalgia and melancholy, but without ever regretting her childhood or youth. The purpose of her work seems to be to piece together visual memories (not necessarily hers) and to do homage to the cornerstones of her life, particularly her mother Loriana, who died suddenly in 2004.

This is especially true in 20.12.53-10.08.04, in which she subverts the fundamental character of photography by superimposing photos of herself on portraits of Loriana, thus altering historical documents. She does not want to retell her mother’s story, something already achieved by the nameless authors of those pictures: Moira wants to enter into Loriana’s life, to become a part of her biography.

The absolute originality of Moira’s personal approach to ‘intimate photography’ (a real and proper genre, clearly defined by Charlotte Cotton­ in her book The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Thames & Hudson, 2004) lies in her being present in all the images. This feature, rather ­surprisingly, is not to be found very often outside the field of traditional self-portrait. In fact, if we think about renowned artists like Cindy ­Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura, Nikki S. Lee or Tracey Moffatt, we enter

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a realm of photography as a medium to record a performance. On the other hand, this Tuscan manipulator does not enact any play, she does not stage any action. She simply uses her own image to stress her wish and her urge to participate both physically and consciously in her own past. Ricci wants to go back in time to live in a bygone era informed by her adult knowledge and emotional burdens. As a child, or unborn, she was unable to grasp the importance of her mom, her home or her surroundings. Now she adds her presence anywhere in the past in order to fulfill the absence in the present of something or someone. Therefore, Moira’s creative process is a double construct. She compiles images by using PhotoShop (20.12.53-10.08.04) or collage (Loc. Collecchio, 26), while at the same time creating relationships that may never have existed.

In every image of 20.12.53-10.08.04 she is dressed and has had her hair styled to fit the period of the original picture. The light strikes her body at the same angle and with the same intensity as it strikes Loriana.

This craftsmanship enables complete communion with her mother: they share the same situation, the same location, the same conditions. And the more their ages converge, the more profoundly this idea is conveyed to us: when her mom is a child their natural relationship seems reversed, the daughter looking after her mother, and when her mom is a young

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woman they look like sisters or friends. The atmosphere evoked by such pictures is one of total serenity, resonant of a winter vacation or a family­ reunion dinner. The clue to the lack of authenticity of all of the images, of their being the product of an artificial construct is that Moira is always gazing at Loriana, who never seems to notice her daughter’s stare. Like the heroine of a science fiction movie, the artist has stepped into a time machine to be closer to her mother, to speak to her, and listen to her. She is there to shape a new, more complete relationship with her mother. But Loriana’s looking in another direction makes this very difficult, perhaps impossible, and Moira is aware of it. She says: ‘I look at her waiting, hoping­for her to take notice of me. Unfortunately, this cannot happen anymore in real life. So I decided to transform myself into an image, to be forever by her side’. Where Trish Morrisey and Gillian Wearing engage with their family history and try to restage their crucial moments, Moira contents herself with a simple appearance in her mother’s life. She tiptoes into old family pictures, posing like an extra in a movie sequence, without altering the rest of whatever is contained by the frame. And she is not interested at all in the quality of the visual material she works with, even though it might easily have been retouched to restore its colors.

Her attitude towards such material is best described by Charlotte ­Cotton: ‘We may wish in retrospect that we had taken extra care in composing a photograph of our friends and families, that the regular mishaps of a finger over the lens or “red-eye” had been avoided. But ultimately these are not the criteria by which such photographs succeed or fail for us.

What is important is the presence of loved ones at a significant event or moment that prompted the taking of the image’. So important is such a presence, that Moira wants to add her own figure to pretend she had the opportunity to experience it with her own body. She wants merely to

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­ stablish a link with the other person; it does not matter if she must give e up part of the essence of her artistic role and look through the eyes of non-professional photographers rather than through her own trained photographic eyes (she graduated at Brera Fine Arts Academy in Milan).

Aesthetic perfection is out of the question; if any kind of perfection can be sought in her images it is the perfection of verisimilitude. Old and new pictures, portraits and self-portraits, film and digital techniques: they all work together to create a final image that is intended to appear as genuine as possible. Otherwise, the link between daughter and mother might be weakened.

The constructive essence of Moira’s artistic process becomes clear when we consider that, as she says, the series 20.12.53-10.08.04 is better understood if taken in its entirety. A single picture is not representative of the whole project and cannot communicate its meaning. In Camera lucida, Roland Barthes relates how he found an old portrait of his mother that soothed him and became a sort of symbol or icon that he contemplated. Perhaps that image was sufficient to retell and explain the entire life of Barthes’s mother (‘this photograph collected all the ­possible predicates from which my mother’s being was constituted and whose suppression or partial alteration, conversely, had sent me back to these photographs of her which had left me so unsatisfied. These same photographs, which phenomenology would call “ordinary” objects, were merely analogical, invoking her identity, not her truth; but the ­Winter Garden Photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me, utopically,

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the impossible science of the unique being’). Ricci’s perspective is diametrically opposed to this: hers is that of the collector, rather than the cherisher of a unique item; she does not look for a irreplaceable image that can sum up and stand for all the others. Far from indulging in ­fetishism or obsession, she is searching for the tiles of an ever expanding­ mosaic; she wants to compose a biographical collage in which all the images relate to one another exactly like all the moments in a person’s life do. Even if this project is spatially disposed on a gallery’s wall, a ­computer’s screen, or a catalogue’s pages, it should be experienced like the visual representation of a flux of time. It is a stream of stages in a person’s life: each and every one of which had a meaning for Moira’s mother­, and for this very reason now it has a meaning for Moira too. That is why she wants to participate in them. As Charlotte Cotton concludes her book, ‘at the heart of this lie the possibilities that postmodernist practice represents for contemporary art photographers: to be able to knowingly shape the subjects that intrigue them, conscious of the ­heritage of the imagery into which they are entering, and to see the ­contemporary world through the pictures we already know’. The only ­difference being that Moira does not try to see the contemporary world, but rather to compose images in which she becomes able to see her own adult life as it might be if spent together with her mother. +

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Toshiko Okanoue The Miracle of Silence

Noblewoman, 1954

The Night of the Dance Party, 1954

Ophelia, 1955

Fantasy, 1953

Premonition, 1952

Noon Song, 1954

Incubation, 1955

Leda in the Sea, 1952

A Trait Angel, 1954

Visit in Night, 1951

The Miracle of Silence, 1952

The Nest of Angels, 1952 All images Š Toshiko Okanoue, courtesy The Third Gallery Aya, Japan

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Toshiko Okanoue

Toshiko Okanoue (1928) started making photo-collages while she was studying fashion drawing in 1950. During the next six years she created­ over 100 works. Shuzo Takiguchi, the famous critic who introduced ­Surrealism in Japan, recommended her works to the Gallery Takemiya in Tokyo. She held her solo shows twice at this gallery in 1953 and 1956, but mmarriage in 1957 ended her career.arriage in 1957 ended her career.

In 1967 she returned to her home town of Kochi and has lived there since then. Ryuichi Kaneko, the curator of the Tokyo Metropolitan ­Museum of Photography, rediscovered her and her works. Her works have been highly acclaimed since the late 1990s and collected by such public institutions as The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the ­Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her two monographs, Drop of Dreams (2002) and the portfolio

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The Miracle of Silence (2007) were published by Nazraeli press. Okanoue is represented by The Third Gallery Aya in Osaka, Japan.

All images: © Toshiko Okanoue, courtesy The Third Gallery Aya, Japan

Mika Kobayashi (1973) is a photo critic and has written and translated books on photography. Recently she has been involved with the organizing of the exhibition, Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan held at International Center of Photography in New York. She is planning to research the Japanese photography collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. One of her book is Shashin wo Yomu Shiten (The Viewpoints of Reading Photographs), published by ­Seikyu-sha in 2005.

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Toshiko Okanoue: Between the Layers of Dreams

Text by Mika Kobayashi

Since the late 1990s the photo-collage works of Toshiko Okanoue have been ‘rediscovered’ through exhibitions and in publications. Her monograph Drop of Dreams: Toshiko Okanoue 1950-1956 was published in 2002

by Nazraeli Press and some of her works were included in an exhibition, The History of Japanese Photography, held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and its accompanying catalogue. Her works have gained recog­ nition for their importance to postwar photography and the surrealist movement in Japan. Her works had been buried in oblivion for nearly forty years, largely because of the course her life took. After throwing all her energies into making over 100 photo-collage works in the first half of 1950s, she married the painter Kazutomo Fujino and ceased working as a photographer. Most of her works were created in her mid-twenties, and they clearly reflect the sensitivity of the age. Many women in Japan in those days were obliged to quit their careers after the marriage.

‘A contemporary version of Alice in Wonderland’ Toshiko Okanoue was born in 1928 and grew up during the War in the Pacific. After the war she learned dressmaking at a vocational school and then studied design at Bunka Gakuin, a small art school in Tokyo.

Under the influence of one of her classmates she began to make ­collages, though at the time she knew little about the history of art, ­including even the surrealist movement from which the idea of photocollage emerged. She regarded her technique of making pictures as a form of ‘hari-e’ (‘hari’ means pasting and ‘e’ means a picture in ­Japanese), a traditional Japanese technique of making pictures by pasting small pieces of colored paper on pasteboard.

In 1952 after meeting the poet Shuzo Takiguchi her vision broadened dramatically. Takiguchi was a leading figure of the surrealist movement in Japan and the organizer of Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), an avant-garde artists’ group. Impressed by the quality of her collage works, he introduced Okanoue to the works of Max Ernst, whose approach had a decisive influence on her. Takiguchi organized two solo exhibitions of her works at the Takemiya Gallery in 1953 and 1956. For the invitation to the Okanoue Toshiko Collage Exhibition in 1953, Takiguchi wrote: Happy New year! Miss Okanoue is not a painter, she is a young lady.

Working by herself, she cuts up illustrated magazines to make collages that depict her very dreams. The resulting album is a contemporary version of Alice in Wonderland. Please come and see for yourself.

As can be seen from his introducing her as a young lady instead of as an artist Okanoue’s making of collage works was regarded as an outcome of

In Love © Toshiko Okanoue, courtesy The Third Gallery Aya, Japan

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involvement with her own fantasy rather than a skill or a technique. And by describing the body of her work as a contemporary version of Alice in Wonderland, Takiguchi seems to have intended to portray her as a little girl who had wandered by accident into an imaginary world. In other words, what Takiguchi discovered in her works and was curating were new ways of seeing and interpreting the contemporary world that was increasingly saturated by the printed images in newspapers and magazines.

The world of fantasy in the magazines Okanoue found the motifs for her works mainly in U. S. magazines such as Life and Vogue which she bought from secondhand bookshops in ­Tokyo. Many of these magazines had been left behind in Japan after the Allied occupation of 1945-1952. The 40s and 50s were the heyday of photojournalism and these magazines carried many articles and photo­

-essays, reportages as well as full-page advertisements richly illustrated with photographs. For those who had undergone the ­poverty and hardship of the war, the occupation and the postwar rehabilitation­ in Japan, the affluent world depicted in the advertisements and the ­fashion plates seemed to be a world of fantasy, the very opposite to life in postwar Japan.

Since Okanoue was at that time studying to become a fashion ­designer, the pictures in Vogue and other fashion magazines must have been fascinating and very attractive to her. The motifs that appear in her works are of fashion models wearing elegant dresses and lingerie.

In these pictures the contours of the models’ bodies and dresses were emphasized by the effect of artificial lighting. By cutting out these figures carefully with scissors and pasting them onto pages that depict different scenes Okanoue was placing the models onto stage-like backgrounds and making them act as the characters in the stories, as is indicated by titles like Ophelia (1955) and Leda in the Sea (1952).

The background scenes of these figures are seas, mountains, ­cities, streets, skyscrapers, interiors of mansions and churches. Sometimes the background is combined with other scenes, inlayed through the doors and windows of the buildings, thus adding further dimensions. For Okanoue, flipping through the pages of American magazines and pasting­ the cutout pictures onto paper was a way of stepping into the world of her dreams and fantasies. This is noticeable in The Nest of ­Angels (1952) where a woman flies through a window to arrive at a dance party being held in an old castle. The irrationality and dreamlike quality of the scenes is sometimes emphasized by the motifs being arranged in a such a way that they appear to be floating in mid-air, as in Noon Song (1954), where insects and butterflies fly around the table on which a woman’s leg of is protruding from a dress. >

White Bouquet © Toshiko Okanoue, courtesy The Third Gallery Aya, Japan

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Headless Women The fantasy worlds she created contain extraordinary aspects, enigmatic­ and sometimes disturbing, particularly the removal of the women’s heads. One striking example is The Miracle of Silence (1952), in which the head of a woman is detached and suspended from a parachute. A probable­reason why Okanoue often removed the heads of women was her experience of using headless mannequins for dressmaking and the study of fashion design. Their heads are replaced with accessories, plants and animals, turning the women into imaginary creatures. In ­Visit in the Night (1951), in which a mysterious woman floats with umbrellas against a foggy cityscape, her head supplanted by a fan. Replacing their heads with animals and insects makes the women seem even more ­enigmatic and extraordinary. In Incubation (1955), the face of a woman resting on a cushion is replaced by a butterfly and she holds the eggs on her lap. What sort of creature is she going to hatch? In Fantasy (1953), a woman with the head of a horse is lying on the floor of a gorgeous ­drawing room surrounded by three horses. In the same vein, in The Night of the Dance Party (1954), the head of a woman in a ballroom is replaced by hands in gloves that appear to be a creature such as a sea anemone.

These irrational and absurd scenes might be read as her own fantasy with a little twist of sexual desire. It is quite interesting to see that the image of fashion models, created as the idealized commodities of the postwar consumer society were transformed into strange creatures charged with highly wrought, complex emotions. The women even ­appear to take on and express the power which has been concealed inside them.

In ­Noblewoman (1954), an armless woman in long dress is standing in

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front of a door. Her profile is almost covered by a big screw and she is about to break through the door with the screw instead of opening it.

Likewise, in A Trait Angel (1954), a woman appears with two hands holding­ guns behind her wings. A man on the right seems to have been blown away by the woman’s shot.

Okanoue’s methods of creating her collage works were based on the exploration of scenes and things that she could have known in postwar Japan only through magazines. The scenes she created in her works show us her admiration for these things and scenes from the western world but also her impulsive desire for something she could not have ­experienced in her own life. Between the complex layers of motifs we can ­imagine what her desires may have been, not all that different from our own. +

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Martina Sauter Double

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Martina Sauter

Martina Sauter is a young German artist whose photographic work ­investigates the relationship between fiction and reality.

After an apprenticeship as a professional photographer from 1997-99 she turned to use her technical expertise in an artistic direction­. She enrolled in Thomas Ruff’s class at Art Academy Düsseldorf. Sauter graduated in 2006 as one of Ruff’s Master students.

Since 2004 she has put on solo shows in her galleries in Bern, Delft and Cologne as well as in renowned institutions like Foam_­ Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam and Ludwig Forum in Aachen. She has also participated in several group shows at, among others, ­Kunstverein Konstanz, Künstlerhaus Bremen and the Aperture ­Foundation New York.

In 2005 she was one of the fifty promising photographers chosen from art academies around the world, presented in the show reGeneration. 50 Photographers of Tomorrow, 2005–2025 at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne. The show travelled to Milan, New York, Passadena and is still on tour throughout the world.

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The artist has received the Thieme Art Award at Art Amsterdam as well as the Young Artists on the Road Award, Aachen, both in 2006.

Her work is part of several collections and has been published in ­exhibition catalogues. Her monograph is 57 photographs. Martina ­Sauter was born in 1974 in Constance and lives and works today in Düsseldorf.

All images: © Martina Sauter, courtesy Galerie Marion Scharmann, Cologne

Stefanie Kreuzer studied German language and literature, Romance ­studies, and art history at the University of Mannheim, the Free University in Berlin and the Terza University in Rome. She has worked at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, part of the Prussian ­Cultural Heritage Foundation, and at the NGBK Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, both in Berlin, as well as the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. In 2005 she became Director of the NAK Neuer Aachener­Kunstverein in Aachen and since 2007 she has been the curator at the Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen.

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Eye Catcher

by Stefanie Kreuzer copy-edited by Uta Hoffmann

‘The lakes must be there so people can be drowned in them; so must the Alps so people can fall into abysses.’ ~ Alfred Hitchcock The pleasure of observing, together with the emotional implications ­associated with the position as spectator, are the artistic focus that ­pervades all of Martina Sauter’s work weaving behind her images like an all-embracing law that places the conventional view of everyday things into a perspective imbued with suspense. The artistic processes used by the photographer to assign viewers (recipients) different ­positions (objectively by inviting them to look into a scene from the outside, or subjectively as spectators from within the scene) or roles (as victims, villains, or voyeurs, etc.) are borrowed from cinematographic practice. In fact, all of Sauter’s photographic work is based on modes of seeing that go back to film work. In the process of visual perception she evokes narratives, which begin with a photographic image that claims an inevitable imaginary ‘before’ and ‘after.’ This cinematographic ­approach in which the individual image is understood as part of a sequence, a

­ equence of pictures, is a fundamental aspect of Sauter’s photo­graphy s that points to the temporality of perception.

This narrative technique, which Sauter uses to communicate meaning­, justifies the position of the observer who looks onto the scene from an objective vantage point and seemingly finds out something ‘about’ the person and his/her psychological implications. At the same time, the viewer receives a certain discursive authority, an almost ­symbolic power over the figure in the picture. By keeping a voyeuristic distance within which to observe him/her without embarrassment, she/ he becomes the viewer’s object of observation. In Sauter’s work, the ­object of visual attraction is frequently a woman. She is subjected to ­‘active’ observation and endures it ‘passively,’ often without even being aware of it. In his writings, Sigmund Freud linked the voyeuristic tendencies of the desire to observe with an innate instinct, which is part of our ­sexuality. Seen in this context, the artist’s photographs are emotionally complex with respect to the observer’s role. The images often refer to stills from Alfred Hitchcock ‘s films which, on the one hand, employ a sexually charged female image, and on the other hand, experiment with visual forms of suspense. As a result, the act of observation is filled with ­tension and involves the observer at an emotional level.

This tension is communicated by means of ‘cinematic’ montage technique: re-photographed details from a scene of a film still are combined with a photographic scene, which the artist has staged in her studio or found elsewhere. In this collage process, she does not smooth out the transition between the different media worlds of film and photography in order to reduce them to a single plane but preserves it deliberately as

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Dächer, 2006, 131,5 x 91 cm © Martina Sauter, courtesy Marion Scharmann, Cologne

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a ‘step’ or spatial gap. What appears to the observer at first glance to be a convincing illusion reveals itself on closer look as a construct, assembled from an assortment of media whose various origins are disclosed in the different grain of the pictorial material. Thus the works are fluctuating­ between the creation of illusion seducing the observer into perceiving the presented space as a single unit, an illusory space, and conscious accentuation of the disruption by deliberately leaving the gap between the disparate fragmented spaces open. This openness functions even on the meta-level, revealing the bare construction of a potential space ­generated from various fragments, which in turn can be interpreted as an intellectual ‘potential space’ in which primarily not the illusion but its ‘made-ness’ is reflected; here the generation of meaning and the forms of observation become the theme within the image. In this sense not only the content of the scene (the ‘what’) but also its visual language (the ‘how’

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of the artistic process) are important to the generation of meaning. Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic images, as demonstrated by Laura Mulvey in her famous and controversial feminist essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), are characterized by a gender-specific coding, in which the ‘male’ (the active gaze) is accentuated by the subjective camera ­direction that transposes the observer into the role of the male prota­ gonist who looks at the woman as the object. The gaze takes on a social dimension by connoting positions of power.

In 5 Türen (5 Doors) (2007) the open doors draw the observer/­pursuer into the image. It is now the observer who is exposed to ‘harassment’ by a room that is not entirely visible; the observer therefore has to imagine the room which is hidden and about which she/he has very little visual ­information and is therefore constantly evading her/him. Here, the ­element of suspense is generated by the narrow gap between the doors linking the everyday situation of open doors with an element of the ­uncanny by alluding to a dimension ‘behind’ the obvious, which cannot be assessed. And while the observer must confront the uncanny she/he imagines in the room, she/he turns into the victim, while in the work ­Flowers (2006), in which a woman looks into a room without entering it, she/he takes on the role of the villain.

This work also thematizes harassment and the fact that the woman­ does not perceive it. She not only turns her unprotected back to the ­observer but – lost in observing the room – offers her/him even the ­delicate line of her white, fragile neck, while the room behind her almost veers into the one-dimensional. Strips of light and dark color seem to deny the woman access to the three-dimensional. Instead she is pushed

Hinterhof, 2004, 112 x 135 cm © Martina Sauter, courtesy Marion Scharmann, Cologne

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into the foreground of the picture toward the observer directly behind her, trapped in a visual arrangement in which she is at the observer’s mercy. For a woman who cannot see is easier to observe, thus becoming an object abandoned to the subject’s gaze: a recurrent theme evident in many of Sauter’s works. In contrast, figures in the artist’s work who ­resist or return the observer’s gaze become the antagonists even if they are being observed in intimate situations.

Based on cinematic images and the patterns of observation they inform, the distribution of gender-specific roles within Maria Sauter’s works reflects a culture which is very much dominated by the male gaze and in which on the one hand, a ban is imposed on the repertoire of ­women: it means that the female figure inside the picture allows the ­observer to look at her without returning her/his gaze not noticing that she is being watched. Alternatively, the roles may be reversed: women take on an ‘active’ role normally ascribed to ‘bad’ girls, femmes fatales and bitches. The women who appear in Sauter’s work as provocative counter-figures emanate from films by David Lynch, who mystifies their role again, not by turning them into victims, but by allowing them to ­become perpetrators. Looking means having power and authority – and it is in this knowledge that the artist utilizes both camera and cutter to cut up the observer’s view. The limited field of vision in many of these works, which are characterized by the absence of people within the

­ icture, is enhanced by striking viewpoints and unusual perspectives. p Here, the recipient is once again forced to not only rethink her/his vantage point and the impacted even compromised perception associated with it but also to experience the emotion as a physical sensation which is often expressed as suspense.

In Dächer (Roofs) (2006), the observer sees a garage, which is ­attached to a house and set slightly aback; its cut corner determines the left-hand corner of the picture frame. The gaze slides with some difficulty across a bulky parapet which dominates a large part of the picture.

The focus appears to be just above the parapet suggesting an observer in a slightly ‘stooped’ position. The balcony wall, whose paint is beginning­ to flake off through weathering, draws a diagonal visual barrier through the lower part of the picture, at the same time forming the ­cutting edge of the work, where two unrelated planes (the balcony and the street) are crossing each other directly, because the connecting ­element of the space which could form a spatial continuum leading from one plane to the other is completely masked by the choice of the vantage point. The observer is stooping behind a protective wall, whose worn condition ­alludes to a certain neglected ambiance evoking a sense of abandonment and loneliness. The observer remains hidden and looks secretly onto the scene ‘below’ him in the street. The location of the scenario is more than fragile, also on a metaphorical level, because the ­chosen ­perspective, visible only as a marginal section, can be seen as a ­fragment with as much remaining hidden as is visible.

Threshold situations, transitional spaces and passages define a large part of what happens in the artist’s work. They form the moments in which observation is forced to refer back to itself, thus beginning to reflect upon itself while on the one hand, the insight is being refused or on the other hand, the space behind is being made unclear or problematic.

The observer in Hinterhof (Backyard) (2004) is in a still more ­precarious position, lurching at the edge of an abyss. Pushed hard against the edge of a flat roof, perhaps even lying flat on the ground, the viewer’s gaze falls steeply down the abyss. On the one hand, the edge of the roof limits her/his perspective, on the other hand, the exposed position on the edge of the abyss grants unusual insights into spaces that can to a certain degree only be seen from a raised perspective. The rest, however­, remains in his/her imagination. The closer the observer gets to the edge of the roof, the greater is her/his risk, the steeper will be the view downwards and the greater appears the promise of the visible space. The ­visible and the concealed, what is seen and what is imagined, active and passive perception, observing and being observed, hunting and being hunted – these qualities are closely combined in these pictures and lead the observer to highs and lows of perception not just in a literal, but also in a metaphorical sense of moving from Heaven through the World to Hell (Goethe/Faust). + The text Eye-Catcher is a shortened version of the original, homonymous text which has been published in the book ‘57 Photographs’ in 2007.

List of works (in order of appearance): p.01: Audrey an der Tür, 2008, 30 x 29 cm p.02: Journalist, 2007, 25 x 26 cm p.03: Radio, 2006, 30 x 27,5 cm p.04: Besprechung, 2005, 25 x 28,5 cm p.05: 5 Türen, 2007, 135 x 122 cm p.06: Flowers, 2006, 25 x 22 cm p.07: Sessel, 2007, 30 x 39 cm p.08: Laura, 2008, 30 x 29,5 cm p.09: Pool, 2008, 135 X 110 cm

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portfolio

Myoung Ho Lee Tree

foam magazine #15 / construct

portfolio text

Myoung Ho Lee

Myoung Ho Lee is a student, lecturer and photographer based in Seoul, Korea. He attracted international acclaim when his series Tree was first published online by Lens Culture (www.lensculture.com) in July 2007. Within days, more than 200 other websites and blogs had reproduced his images and pointed to the original article and images in Lens ­Culture. The buzz continues today, with reproductions of his photographs gracing the covers and inner pages of many high-profile national and international print magazines (of all genres, including art, ecology, entertainment, home decorating, news and men’s fashion), and more than 500 websites referring to his work. His photographs are in the collections of institutions and individual collectors in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America.

Myoung’s Tree series has prompted references to diverse traditions in the history of photography, including landscape photography, anthropological field studies, studio portraiture, fashion, staged photography, cinematic projections, surrealism, and billboard advertising.

Even though Myoung has been practicing photography for several years (he earned his BA in Photography in 2003, and his Masters in Photo­graphy in 2005), it was his conceptual series Tree that catapulted him into ­minor celebrity status on the internet and in pop culture. He is struggling to balance his instant fame with his working life. In addition to his artistic pursuits, he teaches photography at Joon-Ang University in Seoul, where he is also working toward his Ph.D. in Photography.

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Born in 1975, Myoung had his first solo exhibitions in May 2007 at Factory Gallery, and at Gallery 1964, both in Seoul. Earlier this year he was one of two photography-based artists to be included in the first ­InterAlia group show of emerging artists in Korea, which has quickly ­become the most prestigious national venue for visual artists in Korea.

Myoung is the recipient of several awards, including the first Young Photographer’s Award, from the Photo Artist’s Society of Korea in 2005; Korea’s Photography Critic’s Award in 2006, and a grant from the Culture and Art Fund from the Arts Council of Korea in 2007.

His work is represented by Gallery Zandari in Seoul, ­Korea. A signed, limited edition of smaller prints of his Tree #1, Tree #2 and Tree #3 are also sold online via Lens Culture Editions.

All images: © Myoung Ho Lee, courtesy Gallery Zandari, Seoul

Jim Casper is the founding editor and publisher of Lens Culture, a popular online magazine about contemporary photography and shared territories (www.lensculture.com). Casper curates, writes, and lectures about photography. He serves on the board of directors of San Francisco’s PhotoAlliance, and is an active participant in photography festivals and portfolio reviews worldwide.

foam magazine #15 / construct

portfolio text

The Audacity of Big Ideas in Art

by Jim Casper

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses… But photographic seeing has to be constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision. ~ Susan Sontag, On Photography Conceptual art is often envisioned, at first, in words or quick sketches.

Sometimes a preliminary description all by itself is sufficient to give life to an idea; it isn’t necessary to nurture the concept into three-dimensional reality to allow the idea to reach its fullest potential in one’s ­imagination. The blueprint is enough.

However, when a technically challenging idea is physically ­constructed on a large scale, the audacity of that performance confers even greater importance on the concept. Confronting the physical ­reality of a simple-but-preposterous work of art encourages us to consider the idea and its implications with a heightened degree of intellectual and emotional engagement. For example, the installation art work of ­Christo and Jeanne-Claude accomplishes this effect with great success, as does the architecture of Frank Gehry.

South Korean artist Myoung Ho Lee creates elaborate, unlikely large-scale temporary installations as well. But his constructions are built purely for the purpose of photographing the results. His Tree series of photographs pose intriguing questions about representation, reality, art, environment and seeing.

Still cuts of work, 2007 © Myoung Ho Lee

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Simple in concept, complex in execution, Myoung Ho makes us look at trees, one at a time, in their natural surroundings. He isolates each tree from its immediate environment by presenting it against an immense white canvas backdrop, creating in effect, a temporary monumental outdoor art installation.

Myoung Ho then photographs the installation, and the photograph itself becomes a realization of his idea. This performance is then ­repeated, with variations, with different kinds of trees, in different ­locations, in different seasons. The photographs are elegant, clean and quite pleasing to regard. And at the same time, the idea, the concept, and perhaps even the audacity of the effort, seem to tap into some ­universal intellectual pleasure center when viewers comprehend what they are seeing.

Myoung Ho’s constructions are designed to simplify and intensify ­vision, thereby converting ordinary mundane landscapes into objects of meditation. At first, from a distance, we see one of his trees as one would see an advertisement of a tree on a billboard in the middle of a wilderness. We wonder, ‘What’s going on here?’ Why would someone erect a life-size photo of a tree in an empty field? Yet when we realize that this is actually an unusual twist on tromp l’oeil, we feel a jolt of intellectual delight.

On the surface, his photographs simply show what was there in front of his camera. By using a very large temporary framing device to create some visual isolation, he grabs our attention and forces us to look at something that we might typically ignore or not notice. Indeed, the landscapes he photographs might prove to be quite ordinary and even boring without the presence of the white canvas.

The strong graphic nature of the image is immediately engaging to our eyes. And when we begin to notice the details and understand the reality­of what we are seeing (‘This is not a billboard of a tree, it is a real tree!… No, wait, this is a photograph of a real tree that looks like a billboard of a tree.’), we begin to experience the playful delight that comes with the enjoyment of art.

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When photographers like Richard Avedon employed a seamless white backdrop in the studio or out in the American West, the effect was to ­focus the viewers’ attention on the intricate details that visually defined the ­person in front of his camera. Avedon removed the subject from any ­context, and the stark graphic form invited us to notice the contours of a body, the cut of fashion, the lines of age in a face, the everyday toll of wear and tear on humanity, stunning natural beauty. All of these things gain in importance in a photo by Avedon, because we have a moment to breathe, for our senses to relax, and then to exult in focused sensory delight. It also made each of his subjects look larger than life, somehow. Avedon once said, ‘I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their ­environment. They become in a sense... symbolic of themselves.’

By removing the background visual noise and sensory overload, we are offered a relatively unobscured view of the object of our attention. The white background in Myoung Ho’s photos allows the viewer to see the ­intricate detail and textures of branches and twigs and furry needles of trees in sharp relief. We see the thing itself, without the distraction of a cluttered background. We are able to appreciate the graceful, flowing,

Tree #12, 2007 © Myoung Ho Lee

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overlapping lines and organic shapes of the trees. When viewed as a ­series, we can begin to compare one tree’s form to the next, and marvel at the similarities and differences from one species to another, from a tree in winter to a tree in springtime. We notice symmetry and asymmetry.

This series could be thought of as a continuation and extrapolation of a long-time tradition of scientific botanical photography where plants and flowers were often photographed against the temporary background of a hand-held piece of paper, or a bit of white cloth.

But Myoung Ho’s background is more than just a neutral backdrop to clarify vision. The strong geometric form of the backdrop creates a stark and vibrant graphic shape in the middle of the photo. It is as if a hole has been cut out of the center. So the photo becomes interesting even at first glance, because of the strong composition, and the interplay between ­colour and the absence of colour, and the details of shape and form which are cast into high relief thanks to the bright white ground.

Myoung Ho’s use of backdrops is not as straightforward as Avedon’s; here we have the real background (sky, hills, other trees, etc.) revealed all around the upper and side edges. And along the bottom edge, we are suddenly brought in touch with the earth, with weeds and twigs and dirt and snow and grass and rocks blocking out some of the white rectangle at the bottom. The trunk of the tree breaks through the artificial rectangular boundary implied by the backdrop, and asserts its connection to the earth. The roots are implied; and there is no doubt that this tree lives in this precise spot.

Going further, Myoung Ho introduces playful elements, like the ­colourful floating balloons that echo the bulbous shapes of a manicured tree in his Tree #2. (How big are those balloons, and how far away? Are they invisibly tethered to the ground so they hover in just the right spots?)

He also illuminates a tree at night using bright artificial light, which casts dramatic dark shadows onto the backdrop and creates a well of light at the center of the photograph that quickly fades to black at all edges. He changes the game again when he puts bright light behind the white backdrop at night, throwing the tree itself into a not-quite complete silhou-

Tree #8, 2007 © Myoung Ho Lee

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ette, and calling attention to a second tree in the near distance, which is bathed in light from the front.

When viewed as a series, the controlled, similar composition of each photo/installation, encourages comparisons and contrasts. We notice horizon lines at slightly different levels and different qualities of light and colour in the sky depending on the season and that day’s weather.

Or how close the camera is to the tree and the varying shapes and sizes of the backdrops. The back and forth comparisons reveal that each tree is truly unique and beautiful. (Of course each is unique, but do we ­really take the time to notice this kind of thing when we are near a tree?) The series also seems to imply some universal truths generated by the ­‘singular expressions’ of each portrait.

Once the viewer becomes accustomed to recognizing the patterns and similarities of isolated trees and their bits of exposed surrounding environments in this series, Myoung Ho takes even more of that away from us, cropping in to eliminate the sky at the top and the surrounding terrain at the sides and practically all (but not quite) of the foreground and earth below. Now we have a tree alone, clearly outlined against the background, and it is perhaps not as compelling as the uncropped ­photos. We have been trained by this exercise to know that something is back there behind and around the white screen, and when that information is not supplied, we feel a desire to fill in the blanks, to give this tree its context.

None of this could have been done successfully in Photoshop. ­Digital trickery would never impress us the way that these ‘real’ ­portraits have been made and presented to us. Why? Garry Winogrand said, ‘I photograph to see how things look photographed.’ And I think this is part of what drives photographers like Myoung Ho Lee to go to so much trouble to create a photograph that is easy to see in the mind, but much more difficult, and more powerful, when recorded as an actual fact by a camera.

It takes audacity and determination and will to bring a creative ­vision like this into reality. This is no easy task. It requires planning, ­coordination, construction of a backdrop, and a means to erect it and support it without showing its supporting structure. It takes some ­engineering knowhow to make a taut 15-meter by 20-meter canvas appear to be hovering effortlessly behind a huge tree.

But more importantly, Myoung Ho’s giant white canvases are not meant to disappear as a screen in a movie theater does when the movie is ­projected on it. Nor are they to become invisible like the undefined white space over which consumer products float in countless advertisements. In Myoung Ho’s work, we are meant to see and to look at the backdrop as well. The backdrop is part of the subject matter. His backdrops have character of their own. They have wrinkles, ripples, even some torn spots that reveal what is directly behind them. They catch the shadows of the tree, to reinforce its three-dimensional nature even as it is flattened in a two-dimensional photograph.

A photographer is an editor. He or she chooses what to reveal and what to conceal, what to include and what to take away. By placing the backdrop into the center of a photo, and allowing the surrounding action to continue, unfiltered, the backdrop becomes an active participant in this dialogue about plastic space.

The end game is really a series of printed photographs, and they couldn’t exist without the construction and installation of the really big backdrop. And I, for one, am grateful that he took the time and trouble to make all this work.

As a final philosophical bonus, when one of these photos is hung on a wall, a wonderful hall of mirrors effect starts to happen, with a white rectangle at the center surrounded by a rectangle of colour, which is ­surrounded by the white matt, which is surround by a frame, which is surrounded by a white wall, which is preventing us from seeing what is behind that wall…

In a parody of a poem by Joyce Kilmer, Ogden Nash wrote: I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree.

Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.

In my opinion, a similar kind of serious and playful intellectualism ­enlivens the work of Myoung Ho Lee. +

List of works (in order of appearance): p.01: Tree #2, 2006 – 1000 x 800 mm p.03: Tree #1, 2006 – 1000 x 800 mm p.05: Tree #3, 2006 – 1000 x 800 mm p.07: Tree #7, 2006 – 1000 x 800 mm p.09: Tree #9, 2006 – 250 x 200 mm p.11: Tree #4, 2005 – 1000 x 800 mm p.13: Tree #11, 2005 – 1000 x 800 mm p.15: View of Work, 2006 – 500 x 400 mm

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foam magazine #15 / construct

paper selection

Foam Magazine’s choice of paper from ModoVanGelder Amsterdam

Melanie Bonajo is printed on Mega Matt 135 g/m2

Thomas Demand is printed on Mega Silk 150 g/m2

coated fine paper and board

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A Trait Angel, 1954

Visit in Night, 1951

Moira Ricci is printed on Pioneer 135 g/m2

Toshiko Okanoue is printed on Romandruk 100 g/m2

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Martina Sauter is printed on tom&otto Gloss 150 g/m2

Myoung Ho Lee is printed on PhoeniXmotion Xenon 135 g/m2

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premium coated paper and board, FSC-certified

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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a company of

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books

Philippe TerrierHermann: 93 Hollandse Pracht The title is easily explained. Terrier-

Katja Stuke: Könnte Sein / Could Be

Hermann has asked 93 people to tell

Stuke’s work has explored the ­possible

him what they feel the most beautiful

contacts between photo­grapher and

place in southern Holland is. They

subject from the beginning of her ca-

are from different milieus: architects,

reer. Although the ­images in her first

farmers, politicians, artists, business

book Could Be are mostly culled from

people and expatriates as well as tour-

the TV-screen it nevertheless focuses

ists and immigrants. He describes

on that minimal sphere that sur-

this method of working as aiming at

rounds all of us. Her working method

a topographical record or a visual ar-

in past years has been to take movies

chive of the contemporary Dutch

with a video-camera, mostly in the

page, set against a description in

Wolfgang Tillmans: Lighter

English­, French and Dutch from the

When you´re the fan of a particular

­wanted it to be, we can be sure to see

moments that are the most valuable

person that recommended the site,

photographer, you ask yourself with

what he wants us to see. A wall

to her back in her studio. The book

place or building on the opposite

each new book they publish whether

­covered with photos: the emotional,

has been edited to combine these

page. The images clearly parallel

you want to buy it. So you check the

mental and intellectual image spaces

­series with screen-shots of computer

Dutch landscape paintings of the 17th

price, design, size and the important

that Tillmans has been experimenting

games and Hitchcock-movies. The im-

century as much as the new topo-

question of how many new and un-

with have a similar inf luence on

ages following one another in the

graphical photography from the sev-

seen images are in the book. Well,

younger artists today as Ralph

book create a sphere of possible

enties. It would be to easy to call this

Lighter is a large book, nicely designed,

Gibson´s pairings had in the eighties;

­encounters and secret moments in

a conceptual work, as if the descrip-

more expensive than a Taschen book

they still calibrate and liberate the way

the midst of a ­hurried city life. The

tion of an idea could fully explain it´s

and apart from maybe twenty new im-

we deal with images. The pages upon

streets are ­sometimes crowded, some-

formulation in an artistic statement.

ages by Tillmans himself, most of the

pages of outdated discussions on the

times empty, some portraits were

Throughout this well-designed book

140 pictures in the book have not even

abstract vs. the concrete, the aesthetic

taken on public transport or in parks

ideas on beauty, landscape, environ-

been taken by him. Lighter presents

vs. the engaged fade away and we enter

but in all of the people depicted there

mental issues and politics reverberate­,

installation views of all of his exhibi-

into those spaces that Tillmans

is a ­feeling of heightened awareness.

the images themselves in their often

tions worldwide from the last fifteen

­m asterfully constructs only by

The book´s production and printing

factual manner present their docu-

years. Most of these pictures where

following­his intuition in the realm of

are on a very high level and the visual

mentary interest with a solid back-

taken by professional photographers

images. And so these spaces that are

essay that slowly unravels quietly

ground in the history of landscape

hired by the museum or gallery and

so difficult to explain in words are

raises those questions of intimacy and

paintings. Overall this is a very intel-

feature page upon page of white walls

what is to be learned from Tillmans

identity anew.

ligent statement and document.

covered in Tillmans’ well-known

again and again.

landscape. There is one image per

streets of the big cities, and taking photos just like screen-shots of the

­characteristic way. A small text at the

Katja Stuke: Könnte Sein / Could Be

Philippe Terrier–Hermann:

bottom of each page gives place and

Wolfgang Tillmans: Lighter

text by Christoph Hochhäusler,

Hollandse Pracht

time and the name of the images seen.

Hatje Cantz 2008,

Kodoji 2008,

Veenman Publishers 2007

As this is surely a book that was pro-

ISBN 978-3-7757-2187-5

ISBN 978–3–03747–007–7

ISBN 978-90-8690-109-8

duced exactly the way the artist

400 pp. / German / English

96 pp. / German / English

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books

Josef Koudelka: Prague Invasion 68 This book has been simultaneously published in America, France, Germany, England and Italy. For the l­atter half of the 20th century this is one of the defining works of Magnum-style engaged photography. Several images have become iconic, the series itself is known widely and is among those rare works that peak humanistic and political documentation. While some of these images have been published first chance to get the larger picture.

Regina Maria Anzenberger: East

The book combines a timeline, testi-

East has for Europeans long been a

in magazines and books this is the

space and an entity that circumscribes­

monies, translations of the writings on the walls and flags, and publica-

their secret longings. Regina Anzen-

1

tions and other leaflets. The 249

berger, in celebration of the 20th

­i mages in the book where mostly

birthday of her Viennese agency has

taken in the five days of the siege of

edited a book that brings together the

Prague at the end of August 1968 by

work of seventeen photographers in

the Red Army. Koudelka was among

an overview of recent work, both to

the protesters, crowding up against

showcase the agency and to promote

the Soviet tanks, arguing with the

her talents. The photographers were

soldiers and barricading them in any

nearly all born in the seventies, some

way they could find. The public was

in the eighties too, and belong to a

unarmed yet on the second day the

­generation that has grown up with

Russian tanks and soldiers opened

computer games and films rather

fire. In the following days the city fell

than with magazines and news­papers.

into a stupor and only a small part of

The stronger members of the agency

the population dared to assemble in

feel an urge for the real, a longing to

aspect and the quality of the work is

Gossage: Secrets of Real Estate

in the faces and gestures of the inhab-

Gossage has been radically re-formu-

explanatory and veiled. The book is a

and even exotic, but also an attitude

itants of Prague and the young sol-

lating Winogrand´s mid-seventies

print-on-demand object, it has that

to document and depict rooted in the

diers, who hardly seem to understand

black-and-white photography and

distinct handmade-look, allthough it´s

humanistic tradition. The East meant

what they are doing. These remain

­today, together with Moriyama and

produced by the cheapest means pos-

here is a space that ranges from ­China

stunning pictures, balancing an enor-

Mikhailov he is one of the most

sible and not very well printed, and

to the countries that formed the USSR

mous amount of visual information

­precise artists in this field. Even

each and every image radiates a hid-

in the past. Max Sher finds a quiet and

and human tragedy. Koudelka aimed

though he is the least deadpan photo­

den meaning, with a beautiful

dignified way to portray the circum-

his camera at those moments of dis-

grapher of these three, and having

­intelligence at work, that doesn´t fear

stances in a housing project in St.

belief, rage, heroism and confidence

given another edge to Schmidt´s

the white of the sunshine or a black-

­Petersburg, Daniele Mattioli uses

when humans show who they are.

Waffenruhe-style, he can be at times

ness from the shades. In between

­intelligent compositions to describe

This book, along with its historical

decidedly unmanieristic and calm.

these metaphysical antipodes the soft

the changes in China at the street ­level

value, shares with us its lesson and

He has been self-publishing his book-

grey tones of everyday life linger. And

and Bevis Fusha seems to have nearly

message about which there can be no

objects, but his earlier books were

so all of the images taken in the

got lost in the dark shadows in his

mistake.

published by Aperture and Nazraeli.

­suburbs of a nondescript American

­version of Albania. The book does its

His book design has something of the

town, describing just the facts of a

best to promote the photographers

Josef Koudelka: Invasion Prag 68

handmade about it, but his books are

Homes for America-world, picking out

and their abilities and with its design

With text by Jiri Hoppe, Jiri Suk,

never entirely happy with being just

the smallest telling details and hover-

and golden color one feels proud of

Jaroslav Cuhra and others

a photobook, and that is one of the

ing above forgotten situations, were

the achievement of the people who

German edition: Schirmer /

reasons why Gossage has produced

perhaps taken in that same spirit of

produced it.

Mosel 2008,

some of the most inspriring photo-

being at war with the obvious.

Aperture / Thames and Hudson /

books in the past years. But Real

Contrasto / Lundwerg Editores /

­Estate, has in fact only 30 photos,

John Gossage: Secrets of Real Estate

EAST

Mets and Schilt

which are details of houses more or

Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis,

Moser Verlag, Munich, 2008

ISBN 978-3-8296-0359-1

less and is another one of Gossage´s

Missouri 2008

ISBN 978-3-9812344-0-4

296 pp.

beautiful mysteries, at once self-­

Unpaged, 104 illustrations

288 pp. / German / English

protest. The engaging and humanistic­

153

get in contact with the world, a somewhat anachronistic sense of the ‘other‘

Regina Maria Anzenberger:

foam magazine #15 / construct

books

Larry Towell: The World From My Front Porch The world as seen from Larry Towell’s­front porch can be no small world. This book is adequately large in scale. Its combination of texts, ­i mages, documents, hand-written 2

notes, magazine pages and diary pages is quite something to look at and to handle. Towell looks back at his carrier and his newspaper ­stories, pictures of his wife and their ­children as they grow up on their small Midwestern farm, collects

Malick Sidibé: Chemises

c­lippings and all sorts of evidence of the past. So the book is an over-

After having published quite a few

whelming essay in shifting perspec-

books that are in no way remarkable

tives, from the histories of the native

in their design in the past months,

Americans and slaves in his home-

Steidl has managed to come up with

town to the effects of the Hurricane

a gem. Sidibé´s Mali disco-pictures

Katrina, Hizbollah terrorism against

that range between snapshots and

the Lebanese Christians. Towell

portraits have been widely exhibited

seems to bear witness to these con-

in the past years, and nearly everyone

flicts as much as he tries to come to

I know has his first Scalo book.

terms with them, and it´s as if Whit-

­Chemises is a facsimile reprint of the

man and Thoreau themselves guided

folders the photographer kept in his

Niels Stomps: Mist

studio in Bamako to show his glued-in

The Three Georges Dam in China was

­necessary information and facts about

collecting, showing, weighing. Coun-

prints to potential customers. The

one of the dreams of Mao Tse-Tung.

the dam and is comparable to the

ter to that the book design is a little

book is printed in a range of pastel

Since construction began photo­

book Empty Bottles by Wassink and

sumptuous and where Chris Boot

colors with the black-and-white photos

graphers and film-makers have docu-

Lundgren. The photography is neither

has done his best for Towell I´m not

set off with a slight shadow together

mented this gigantic project that so

dramatic nor sentimental, it doesn´t

exactly sure this helps the ‘rag pick-

with Sidibé´s ballpoint notations of the

radically changes the face of the land-

shun the new stereotypes when it

ing’ side of the material collected.

clubs the pictures were taken in and

scape as much as it puts the ­people

comes across them, the emotional

The photographer studies poverty,

stains from use. This results in a more

living there in peril. From Burtynsky

­response is drawn from the colors and

helplessness, weakness, powerless-

than handsome object-like appearance

we learn about the first stage of con-

light; if reality chooses to be struc-

ness, but the book has the appear-

that either carries you into the senti-

struction, the architectural dimension

tural, industrial and repetitive,

ance of a catalogue in certain parts.

mental mode of looking into the

of the building works; when Niels

­fragments will be enough to under-

Maybe there are too many currents

­distant disco past and or admiring the

Stomps travelled there two years ago,

stand whatever´s necessary. Mist sets

in play, and I for one are unable to

hyper-realistic nature of today’s visual

he concentrated upon something

this to work by showing us the empty

come to terms with them. I do not

culture. It is more a document of

­different. For a younger generation of

spaces of the buildings that are so

wish to criticize a man that has been

­fashion than of history, as Jeffrey Ladd

Dutch photographers, a lot of images

hastily built, the backsides of Chinese

working in such an earnest way for

remarks, but it also provides rich

have already been seen and there is no

tourists, and the courts and backyards

many years, but maybe the Martin

­material to study a highly-talented

need to reproduce them. For this gen-

of the houses of the cities that rise and

Parr influence is getting just a little

photographer at work.

eration the production of a book

fall so easily in China today.

to strong in this world.

him to undertake this huge effort in

means the same as an exhibition in a

Malick Sidibe: Chemises

gallery meant in the eighties and nine-

Niels Stomps: Mist

Larry Towell: The World from

Steidl / GwinZegal, Göttingen

ties. Mist was designed to be light-

Veenman 2007

My Front Porch

2007

weight, to present the images both as

ISBN/EAN 978-90-8690-050-3

Chris Boot 2008

ISBN 978-3-86521-523-9

a narrative and as a series, to have a

Three Gorges Dam China

ISBN 978-19-0571-209-0

168 pp. / English / French

text on the side that provides the

116 pp. / English

224 pp. / English

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4

books

3

Kiyoshi Suzuki: soul and soul 1969 – 1999 Suzuki was a photographer who set his own course. He self-published his first book soul and soul in 1972 and was friends with photographers like Moriyama and Robert Frank. Apart

Oliver Sieber: Character Thieves

from the Noorderlicht Wonderland exhibition in 1999 his work has not

Oliver Sieber has slowly built his repu-

and go out to meet eachother at social

been shown outside Japan and conse-

tation among the photographers of his

events. The community, mostly based

quently he is not very well-known.

generation through his precise por-

in Japan, is growing and the cosplayers­

Machiel Botman and the Noorderlicht­

traits of very different circles within­

in the book are from such diverse

team have managed to produce a

today’s youth culture. The fanzine he

places as New York, Berlin, Toronto

beautiful book that helps establish

publishes with Katja Stuke, their exhi-

and Osaka. The portraits were taken

Suzuki as a photographer. Nine book

bitions and their web gallery and all

in the cosplayers homes by which

dummies of his images

their projects follow a path of inde-

strategy Sieber confronts everyday life

­i ntimate and thorough text by

pendence that rarely crosses the path

with this somewhat excentric reaction

­Botman help illuminate the back-

of museums or galleries. Through this

to consumer culture. The gap ­between

ground. But it is the poetical quality

he has been able to work with Asian

someone that is an avid fan of action

of Suzuki´s images and the loving

and North American photographers

films or animes and someone that

way they are reproduced that makes

in a realm that goes by unnoticed by

longs to become the hero is not so far

this an instant classic and collector´s

the larger public. In a word, he belongs

in the end. Lara Croft, both guns

item. Suzuki was a perfectionist. His

to those independent photographers

drawn and her arms hanging by her

book dummies underwent changes

today, who sometimes become well-

sides, looking into the distance, photo­

so often that his search for meaning

known, like Stephen Gill, but some-

graphed in front of her family home

cannot be fixed by a single photo-

times lesser known, who produce

in a suburb in New Jersey. Looking at

graph. Only few photographers, like

Credits:

­according to their own principles. This

this well-shot portrait I can´t help

Ed van der Elsken, Myako Ishiuchi or

All images are reprodutions of book

series that Sieber has been working on

­asking myself, what kind of language

Antoine ­­D´Agata, have succeeded in

covers, unless numbered. Credits for

about cosplayers for two years now

can describe where this person is or

this: forming a visual language that

the numbered photos:

has ­become more extensive than his

wants to be?

is poetical and descriptive, raw and

and an

authentic, open and dark.

­previous work. The book, in a clear

Text by Sebastian Hau

1 © John Gossage, courtesy Sheldon Art

design that does it´s best to help focus

Oliver Sieber: Character Thieves

on the images, presents fifty portaits

Schaden.com feat Böhm / Koba-

Kyoshi Suzuki: Soul and soul

2 © Niels Stomps, courtesy Veenman

of those people who self-fashion dress-

yashi Publishers 2008

Noorderlicht 2008,

Publishers

es and dress up as their favourite ani-

ISBN 978–3–932187–63–6

ISBN 978-90-76703-35-0

3 © Oliver Sieber, courtesy Schaden.com

me, manga or video game character­

72 pp. / Japanese / English

76 pp. / English

4 © Kiyoshi Suzuki, courtesy Noorderlicht

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Galleries

foam magazine #15 / construct

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

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

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

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

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Zaida Oenema (27) & Sylvia Korving (30) Photographers Dutch We read Foam Magazine for inspiration and to keep ­updated about what’s happening in photography-land.

Marnix Goossens, Melon, 1997 C-print, Size 53x55 cm, Edition of 10

From now on Foam_Editions is proud to represent a series of five Works by Marnix Goossens Also in Foam Editions: Daniëlle van Ark, Fleur Boonman, Mitch Epstein, Marnix Goossens, 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 Foam Editions Keizersgracht 609 NL-1017 DS Amsterdam T +31 (0)20-5516500 W www.foam.nl E jacob@foam.nl

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Foam exhibits all genres of photography: fine art, documentary, applied, historical and contemporary; a museum with international allure. Along with 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 the BankGiro Loterij

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Š 2007 Malick SidibÊ for all images

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Malick Sidibé ~ Chemises ~

13 June – 15 October 2008

Foam_Fotografiemusem Amsterdam presents unique work by the ­celebrated Malinese photographer Malick Sidibé (1935). Sidibé is the eminence grise of African photography and one of the first African photo­graphers to win recognition in the West for his work. Centrepiece of the exhibition is a series of original chemises, coloured sheets of card on which Sidibé pasted small prints of the photos he took at parties and events in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Partygoers were able to view and order copies of photos after the event. The chemises displayed here date from between 1962 and 1973. They are accompanied by numerous portraits­taken by Sidibé in the 1970s at his studio in Bagadadji, the area of Bamako in which Sidibé is living. Together the displays offer a unique insight into Malinese society in the early years following independence.

Malick Sidibé was born in 1935 in Soloba, near Bamako (Mali). He was the only child in the family to be sent to Bamako to study at the Ecole des Artisans Soudanais. Gérard Guillat, a French photographer living in Mali, took Malick on as an assistant. From Guillat, Sidibé was able to learn the basic skills of photography. He earned his living by taking photos at ­parties given by the young people of Bamako’s middle classes.

When Sidibé set up for himself in 1962 he soon became a popular photographer at parties and events in Bamako: from football games, weddings and baptisms to dance festivities and Christmas celebrations.

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Especially remarkable are the photos he took at the so-called surprise parties organised by the young Malinese themselves. They had formed into a series of clubs which they named after their favourite pop idol or record (Los Cubanos, Les Las Vegas, Les Caïds). Sidibé covered as many as five events a night before retreating to his darkroom to develop the negatives. He would then paste prints of the photos onto cards and display these so the partygoers would be able to view and select the ones they wanted.

In the mid-1970s, Sidibé moved into a new area of work, confining himself to studio portraiture and the repair of cameras. Over 1,000 of his chemises have survived. Some have been bought up by private collectors, but most still remain at Studio Malick in Bamako. This collection is a unique historical record of Malinese society.

Malick Sidibé received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for his entire oeuvre at the Venice Biennale of 2007. This year Sidibé was also honoured by the International Centre for Photography (ICP) in New York with their 24th Lifetime Achievement Award. + The exhibition was made in collaboration with Association Gwinzegal and Prince Claus Fund and was made possible with the support of NCDO. Foam is supported by the VandenEnde Foundation and the BankGiro Loterij.

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Bunker Frauenwald, Vorraum Bunkerkommandant 2005 © Daniel & Geo Fuchs – ‘STASI - Secret Rooms’

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

7 June - 22 June 2008

Gina Kranendonk ~ Do me a garden, please!

Gina Kranendonk took a journey alongside the Dutch railway and photo­ graphed gardeners and their allotments. Keeping such a small garden, away from your house is a typical Dutch cultural phenomenon, in which tradition and nature fuse. The project consists of a series of portraits of people from different nationalities that cultivate their own crops on small bits of land.

11 April - 22 June 2008

Expanding the City Virtual Museum Zuidas ~ ZOOM Collection From its inception, the development of Zuidas, Amsterdam’s top ­international corporate location, retained an essential place 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 V ­ irtual 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 photo­ graphy. 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 with an exhibition.

The Chequered Woman, August 1971 © Malick Sidibe/Association GwinZegal

13 June - 15 October 2008

Malick Sidibé ~ Chemises

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07-06-04 © Jasper Wideman

This summer Foam presents a unique work by the celebrated Malinese photographer Malick Sidibé (b. 1935). Sidibé is the eminence grise of African photography and one of the first African photographers to win recognition in the West for his work. Centrepiece of the show is a series of original chemises, coloured sheets of card on which Sidibé pasted small prints of the photos he took at parties and events in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Partygoers were able to view and order copies of photos after the event. The chemises displayed here date from between 1962 and 1973. They are accompanied by numerous portraits taken by Sidibé in the 1970s at his studio in Bagadadji, a working-class area of Bamako.

Together the displays offer a unique and often heart-warming insight into Malinese society in the early years following independence.

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

27 June 2008 - 5 July 2008

YiPArt Photo Auction 2008 More than 90 (inter)nationally respected and renowned photographers have donated works to Young in Prison (YiP) for the YiPArt Photo ­Auction.

Also rare Dutch vintage prints will be auctioned.

Young in Prison offers incarcerated children across the world the opportunity for a brighter future. In crammed and dirty cells these ­children are subjected to abuse, violence and disease.

YiP is a small yet very active group of volunteers, dedicated to assisting these children in their struggle to break free from the negative spiral of crime. Creativity is both used as a means to open the eyes and minds of young detainees in prisons where YiP is active, as well as a way to raise funds and awareness for the circumstances these children find themselves in.

This year YiP Photo Auction will be held for the third year in succession. All income from the auction will go directly to the YiP’s projects.

Ine, Josephine and Janine, Texel, June 1962 © Kors van Bennekom

10 July - 14 September 2008

Domingo Millela

Kors’s Choice ~ photos by Kors van Bennekom

The past six years, Domingo Milella has concentrated on an ongoing project which takes as it’s central focus the postmodern landscape, from dwellings to urban periphery, which to date has taken him to ­remote corners of Europe as well as Mexico.

Milella’s perspective offers us a fresh interpretation of the changing­face of our surroundings to day. Close by or far off borders, nations, megalopolis, are the subject of a geography at the edge of ­importance and function. Using an 8 x 10 camera, Milella captures these contra­dictory panoramas subtly noting the struggle for place between man and nature in contemporary society. His photographs have a ­certain impartiality allowing the viewer to interpret the image and draw their own conclusion.

In 1956, the peak of the cold war, Kors van Bennekom started as a photo­grapher for the Dutch communist newspaper ‘De Waarheid’, in Amsterdam. Here he worked until 1965. His photos form a beautiful ­document of the hard working people in the city of Amsterdam during a time of poverty, rebuilding and commotion.

After his work as a press photographer Van Bennekom continued as a theatre photographer. For several decades he portrayed numerous artists and cultural life in Amsterdam. From the very beginning of his career he also photographed his private life, his wife, children and grandchildren. The exhibition marks the 75th birthday of Van Bennekom­, and shows a selection of work chosen from around 700.000 negatives and many unique vintage prints.

27 June – 31 August 2008

Cuautepec Notturno, Mexico City, 2004 © Domingo Milella

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19 September - 9 November 2008

Ishiuchi Miyako Foam presents the first European retrospective of works by the Japanese­artist Miyako Ishiuchi (b.1947). She attracted attention at the 2005 Venice Biennale for her series Mother’s, but a cross-section of her work has never been shown before. The exhibition is a cross-section of the photographer’s works from the 1970s to the present. The exhibition is organized by Galerie Langhans in Prague, and includes photos from the series Yokosuka Story (1976–77), Apartment (1977–78), Endless Night (1978–80), 1.9.4.7 (1988–89), 1906 to the Skin (1991–93), and ­Mother’s (2000–05).The curator of the exhibition is Machiel Botman. In conjunction, a book is being published by Manfred Heiting.

Mallam Mantari Lamal with Mainasara, Abuja © Pieter Hugo

5 September – 2 November 2008

KLM Paul Huf Award 2008 Pieter Hugo

no.35 from the mother’s series, 2002 © Ishiuchi Miyako

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In March 2008 an international jury named Pieter Hugo as the winner of the annual KLM Paul Huf Award. Part of this prize for young international photographers is an exhibition at Foam.

Pieter Hugo created the series The Hyena Men while traveling in Nigeria with a troupe of animal charmers and their collection of ­tenuously domesticated hyenas, monkeys and snakes. The portraits feature groupings of men and animals surrounded by the barren urban centers of northern Nigeria. The Honey Collectors series emerged from a period Hugo spent with a collective of workers in the forests of Ghana. Pieter Hugo catches the costumed foragers during breaks from the frenzy of their pursuit, frozen against a background of ­impossibly lush greenery. +

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upcoming issue

~ Don’t miss #16, the Talent issue! ~ 12 portfolios of young ­talented photographers, each searching and e­ xploring their own style.

From ­documentary to fine art.

Out in September 2008

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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 #15, Summer 2008 June 2008

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 a.i.

Iris van Santen / Marcel Feil Concept, Art Direction & Design Vandejong, Amsterdam – Pjotr de Jong / Marcel de Vries / Hamid Sallali Typography Hamid Sallali Contributing Photographers Melanie Bonajo / Thomas Demand / Moira Ricci / Toshiko Okanoue / Martina Sauter / Myoung Ho Lee Cover photograph Martina Sauter, Audrey an der Tür, 2008 © Martina Sauter Special thanks to Zaida Oenema & Sylvia Korving Contributing Writers Merel Bem / Chrissy Lange / Giulio Piovesan / Mika Kobayashi / Stefanie Kreuzer / Jim Casper / Sebastian Hau / Marcel Feil Copy editing Pittwater Literary Services, Amsterdam – Rowan Hewison Translation Liz Waters (Pittwater Literary Services) / Sam Herman / Tom Johnston / Iris Maher Lithography & Printing Drukkerij Slinger Strooijonkerstraat 7 1812 PJ Alkmaar – NL www.drukkerijslinger.nl

ModoVanGelder, Amsterdam For this edition the following paper has been selected: Pioneer offset 300 g/m2 Pioneer offset 80 g/m2 Pioneer offset 70 g/m2 Mega Matt 135 g/m2 PhoeniXmotion Xenon 135 g/m2 Pioneer offset 135 g/m2 Romandruk blauwwit 100 g/m2 tom&otto Gloss 150 g/m2 Mega Silk 130 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: 978-90-70516-10-9 © photographers, authors, Foam Magazine BV, Amsterdam, 2008.

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

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

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