Book Excerpt: 1001 Photographs You Must See In Your Lifetime

Š 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

104 1910s

OLD FAITHFUL, YELLOWSTONE

CORCOVADO

WILLIAM HENRY JACKSON

MARC FERREZ

Genre Landscape Date 1870 Location Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming Format Large-format glass plate

Genre Landscape Date 1870 Location Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Format Panoramic

French émigré Marc Ferrez (1843–1923) documented William Henry Jackson (1843–1942) served in the emergence of his adopted homeland of Brazil the Union Army during the American Civil War as a nation-state. He was one of the first artists to (1861–65). Two years after the end of the conflict use the panorama, an experimental technique he opened a photography studio with his brother new to photographers of his era.

Edward, but shortly thereafter embarked on the Ferrez became known for his depiction of the urban landscapes of Rio de Janeiro. After a fire travels that would define his career, exploring the destroyed his studio in 1873, he returned to Paris, American West as it was opened up by the newly where he purchased the panoramic camera that laid railroads.

Between 1870 and 1879, Jackson photographed could capture 180-degree views and which would extensively in Utah, Wyoming, Montana and become a hallmark of his style.

Colorado as a member of the US Geological and In 1870 Ferrez took this photograph of the Geographical Survey. He worked on a monumental Corcovado (meaning “hunchback” in Portuguese) scale, using the “mammoth” size of glass plate that reads “Entrance to Rio” in French. The negatives measuring 20 inches x 24 inches (51 x Corcovado is now known mainly for the statue of 61cm). The trips were arduous, not merely because Christ the Redeemer, which was installed on the of the inhospitable terrain, but also because of the mountaintop in 1931, but Ferrez’s view provides need to prepare, expose and develop the plates an early insight into the imposing position of using the wet collodion process, which could take the mountain above the developing city on the over an hour per exposure to complete. Jackson sheltered bay. SY found that washing the plates in hot water from natural springs could halve the drying time. He traveled with a team of five to seven men armed with rifles, carrying the heavy equipment on mules. On one occasion, when one of the pack animals fell, the plates were broken, and he lost a whole month’s work, forcing him to return to the same landscapes again to remake the photographs.

This is Jackson’s imposing and dramatic image of Old Faithful, the geyser in Yellowstone Valley that spurts thousands of gallons of steam and water more than 170 feet (52m) into the air regularly around eleven©times day. PLInternational Publications. All Rights Reserved.

2017aRizzoli 1910s 105

MAN WALKING

OSCAR WILDE NO. 18

ÉTIENNE-JULES MAREY

NAPOLEON SARONY

Genre Scientific Date 1882 Location Paris, France Format Glass plate

Genre Portrait Date 1882 Location New York Format Large format

Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) was a French doctor and an inventor who developed or improved dozens of mechanical devices for the measurement of biological phenomena. Among his achievements was a vast improvement to the sphygmograph, a non-invasive mechanical device for measuring blood pressure.

In the 1880s Marey began to use photography to record things that had been difficult to document, for example the beating of a bird’s wings and the gait of a running man. His work was similar to that undertaken around the same time by Eadweard Muybridge, and there is evidence that the two were aware of each other’s work. Marey developed a number of innovations in the course of this research, including a method of creating multiple high-speed exposures on a single plate, as in this image. He also developed a chronophotographic gun, a camera resembling a rifle that could record twelve photographs onto a spinning disk at high speed. These images formed a sequence that could be watched back by spinning the disk, thus animating the images into rudimentary movies. LB

Napoleon Sarony (1821–96) was New York’s most celebrated portrait photographer. His studio at Union Square employed more than thirty technicians who printed, hand-tinted, painted, and produced his photographs of the celebrities of the day. In a commercial innovation, he would pay the famous sitters a fee for the rights to sell their likeness, reputedly giving the actress Sarah Bernhardt $1,500 to pose for his camera. Being photographed by Sarony was a performance worthy of the theater, and aware of the value of self-promotion and a visible brand, he often dressed himself in a fez and military-style uniform.

He employed an assistant, Benjamin Richardson, to operate the camera, and would engage the subject in banter and conversation until he felt the moment was right; he would then subtly signal Richardson to fire the shutter. He recalled in an interview: “We photographers have queer experiences. Ours is a most excellent opportunity to study human nature, and making a baby laugh is not the one trick of the calling. In order to take a good photograph one should know something about the sitter’s habits and surroundings. This he must learn at a single glance or by an adroit question.”

The complexity of this process was a key factor in helping the Supreme Court to decide whether photographs merited copyright protection. Sarony made this study of Oscar Wilde, as usual paying for the rights for the session. When Burrow Lithograph stole the photograph and published it themselves, Sarony sued. He won damages of $610, and the court ruling in his favor established copyright protection for photography in the United States. PL

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

118 1910s

Š 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

ALLIUM OSTROWSKIANUM/ DUTCH HYACINTH KARL BLOSSFELDT Genre Documentary, Still life Date 1928 Location Berlin, Germany Format Large-format glass plate

“Blossfeldt has done his part in that great examination of the perceptive inventory, which will have an unforeseeable effect on our conception of the world.”

Walter Benjamin 236 1910s

It is not hard to believe that this arresting fusion of science and symmetry was created by an artist with a background in sculpture. This image and much of the collection of which it is a part became popular with both the Surrealist and the New Objectivity movements. Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932), a trained sculptor and an amateur botanist, taught at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin and ultimately produced a collection of more than 6,000 such images over three decades, which he used as teaching aids for his art and architecture students, particularly in the German winters, when it was hard to find fresh plants and flowers. The warm blacks, rich shades of gray and the feeling of depth in this image are all qualities associated with its photogravure production. In this technique, invented in 1879, an image is transferred onto a metal plate and then etched into it before being printed. When looking at a photogravure under a magnifying glass, a honeycomb appearance can be identified; this is the shape of the grid used in the printing process.

Blossfeldt was fascinated by nature’s underlying structures, and pioneered his own method of macrophotography to document flora and plants at up to thirty times their original size. He used long exposure times of between eight and twelve minutes in soft daylight and large glass negatives, which were easy to retouch and required little enlargement. He meticulously posed and retouched images to create a uniform and aesthetically pleasing collection. His diligent work over thirty years was first published in 1928 in three portfolios entitled “Art Forms in Nature.” CP

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

VIEW FROM THE BERLIN RADIO TOWER LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY Genre Fine art Date 1928 Location Berlin, Germany Format Medium format

In the winter of 1928, Hungarian painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) left the Bauhaus school in Dessau, Germany, for Berlin at the start of a new phase in his life. Soon after his arrival in the capital city, he climbed to the top of the Funkturm Berlin (Berlin Radio Tower) carrying his medium-format Ernemann 6 x 9cm (23/8 x 39/16-inch) camera. This is one of the images he captured at the summit.

Completed in 1926, the Funkturm Berlin was a feat of engineering to rival the Eiffel Tower.

Its base was seven times smaller than that of its French counterpart, and thus allowed MoholyNagy an unrestricted view of the ground from its 450-foot (137m) summit. His explorations of the world beneath him are typical of his experiments with perspective, scale and unusual viewpoints.

Whereas in Paris he had photographed the Eiffel Tower from below, making striking compositions from its canopy of girders stretched above his head, in Berlin he flattened out the landscape below into a complex pattern of shapes and lines. The snow added to the graphic nature of the image, with the delicate tracery of the winter trees and the subtle grays of the areas of grass creating a harmonious scene that resembles an abstract Cubist painting. The resulting image is typical of Moholy-Nagy’s explorations of the fluidity and portability of the new generation of 35mm cameras that liberated photographers from the cumbersome limitations of tripodmounted, large-format cameras, and permitted them to explore the world from a host of exciting fresh viewpoints. PL

“We have—through a hundred years of photography and two decades of film—been enormously enriched . . .

We may say that we see the world with entirely different eyes.” László Moholy-Nagy

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

1910s 237

PEPPER NO. 30 EDWARD WESTON Genre Still life Date 1930 Location Carmel, California Format 8x10 large format view camera

“Weston pulled off a sort of photographic hat trick: he created artistic and highly evocative images that also manage a near scientific recording of what was in front of the lens.” DP Review 244 1910s

This photograph is one of the first, and purest, examples of photographic Modernism: it is not “about” a pepper as such; rather, it is a study of light and form, of which Edward Weston (1886–1958) wrote, “It is . . . more than a pepper; abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter. It has no psychological attributes, no human emotions are aroused: this new pepper takes one beyond the world we know in the conscious mind.”

With his commitment to exploring the limitations of photography as a way of seeing and representing the world, Weston was a pioneer.

Previously American and European photographers had been preoccupied with asserting photography’s relationship to painting, often by imitating oils and watercolors in an approach that tended to look to the past rather than the future. Weston challenged this convention, making photographs that looked like nothing that had been seen before. His obsessive scrutiny of this simple pepper (which he photographed and printed many times over) echoes both Modernist sculpture and the human body. In 1936 Weston joined the group f/64, a collective of West Coast photographers named after the smallest aperture in the cameras they used. Their aim was to champion what became known as “straight photography,” which they defined in their manifesto as photography “possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other form.” Weston applied this approach to a range of subjects: landscapes, nudes, portraits and the still lifes, of which “Pepper No. 30” remains the most famous. JG

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

DIVERS. HORST WITH MODEL, PARIS GEORGE HOYNINGEN-HUENE Genre Fashion Date 1930 Location Paris, France Format Large format

Fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene (1900–68) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a German father and an American mother. He fled his birthplace because of the Russian Revolution, coming first to London before settling in Paris in 1920. He worked for Harper’s Bazaar and collaborated with Surrealist Man Ray on his fashion pieces. By 1926, he was chief photographer for French Vogue, where he became known for his stylish studio work, often inspired by the forms, architecture and sculpture of Greek antiquity.

“Divers. Horst with Model, Paris” brings to mind the scuola metafisica paintings of Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico because of its dreamy sense of stillness, bold composition, and dramatic use of geometric shapes and volume. It depicts an attractive, androgynous couple sitting on a diving board staring out to a horizon of sea and sky, but this is an illusion. Hoyningen-Huene shot the carefully constructed image on the roof of Vogue’s Paris studio above the Champs-Élysées. The fact that the photograph is in black and white helped him to produce what is an artful deceit.

Color photography was rare in magazines at the time, and this image was printed in monochrome in the July 5, 1930, US edition of Vogue alongside a necessarily descriptive caption of the Izod beachwear: “Two-piece swimming suit with garnet-red trunks and a mixed red-and-white top of machine-knit alpaca wool, resembling a sweater weave.” The feature formed part of a sports issue, and one of the two apparently athletic-looking subjects was his lover, the early male model Horst P. Horst. CK

“Necromancy requires a mastery of technique, and George Hoyningen-Huene was one of photography’s early practitioners of this art of transformation.”

William Meyers

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

1910s 245

GAS STATION, MEXICO PAUL OUTERBRIDGE Genre Vernacular, Street, Documentary Date c. 1950 Location Mazatlán, Mexico Format 35mm

Paul Outerbridge (1896-1958) started his career in the 1920s, when his studio portraits and modernist still lifes of everyday objects appealed to the worlds of fashion and art. His work as an advertising photographer was published in Good Housekeeping and Vogue. From the early 1930s, he worked exclusively in color, using the tricolor carbro process that enabled him to produce vivid images.

After a decade of pioneering work in color photography, Outerbridge moved from New York 390 1910s

to Laguna Beach, California. Using a 35mm camera rather than the large-format equipment of the studio, he began to take photographs of the towns and ports along the coast of Southern California and the Baja Peninsula. Among them was this image of a gas station in Mazatlán, a Mexican resort town along the Pacific shoreline. Shot using Kodachrome, its lush greens and rich, saturated reds make a mundane subject in a humdrum location glow like a jewel while conveying the scorching heat of the day with the use of shadow.

Outerbridge’s work influenced and prefaced that of the exponents of “New Color” photography in the 1970s, including William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Joel Meyerowitz. CK

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

THE KISS AT THE HÔTEL DE VILLE ROBERT DOISNEAU Genre Portrait Date c. 1950 Location Paris, France Format Silver print, 35mm

The Kiss at the Hôtel de Ville depicts a young couple in a passionate embrace outside the City Hall in Paris. It is one of a series of photographs that Robert Doisneau (1912–94) produced on the theme of lovers in the French capital in the springtime, and which appeared in Life magazine in June 1950.

Although the monochrome photograph, with its slightly blurry background, appears as if reportage, the iconic image is staged; Doisneau paid two actors to pose for him. While the picture

fulfils the brief inasmuch as it evokes a Paris steeped in romance, Doisneau uses the symbols and codes of street photography to conjure up a fantasy in what is a highly effective piece of tourist public-relations material.

On closer inspection, some signs of subterfuge become apparent. On what looks like a cold day, where passers-by are wearing hats, the lovers at the center of the image are conveniently bareheaded, so their kiss is obvious to all. Even more suspiciously, the viewpoint is from a seat in a café with an unobstructed line of sight, and it was unlikely a couple would stop to kiss right in front of him. The picture has become a lesson in the nature of photographic artifice. CK

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

1910s 391

THE PHOTOJOURNALIST ANDREAS FEININGER Genre Portrait Date 1951 Location New York, New York, USA Format Large format

“I look at objects of nature primarily with the eye of the structural engineer who is fascinated by the interrelationship of function and form.” Andreas Feininger 394 1910s

Andreas Feininger (1906–99) was born in Paris, the son of the painter Lyonel Feininger. He grew up in Germany, and in the 1920s attended the Bauhaus school of art and design, where Lyonel taught alongside architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer and artist Josef Albers. Andreas studied cabinetmaking and architecture but developed an interest in photography. After he graduated in architecture, he left Germany for Sweden in 1933, and then immigrated to the United States, where he worked as a freelance photographer in New York.

In 1951 Life held a competition for young photographers. Feininger, now a staffer on the magazine, was commissioned to photograph the winner, Dennis Stock. The result was this image, which shows Stock holding a Leica SM camera vertically to his face, his eyes suggested by the shape of the Tewe viewfinder and lens. Although a portrait, Stock’s face is barely visible. Stock has become a symbol, part man, part camera, and an example of the new breed of photojournalists who were the lifeblood of popular picture magazines like Life and Look, capturing images of celebrities and news events. Feininger’s use of geometric shapes, strong light, and shadow reflects the clean, modernist lines of the Bauhaus.

Stock proved a worthy victor. He became a successful documentary photographer and went on to join the highly respected Magnum Photos agency. Feininger’s photograph became so strongly identified with the concept of a photojournalist that Life used it for the cover of the book Life Photographers: What They Saw (1999). CK

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

TITLE ARTHUR SASSE Genre News Date 1951 Location Princeton, New Jersey, USA Format 35mm

This comical image of the great Albert Einstein shows the lighter side of the genius. Einstein was returning home from a party to celebrate his seventy-second birthday, at Princeton University where he had spent most of his scientific career after fleeing Hitler’s Germany for the United States in the 1930s. He was leaving the venue together with Dr. Frank Aydelotte, the former head of the Institute for Advanced Study, when they were besieged by photographers. As they prepared to drive away, Arthur Sasse (1908–73), working for UPI, called out to Einstein “Ya, Professor, smile for your birthday picture, Ya?” to which Einstein promptly pushed out his tongue, possibly little suspecting that the photographer would be fast enough to capture the moment. Sasse had quick reflexes, however, and got the shot.

Publication of this image was not a foregone conclusion: editors worried that printing such an image might seem disrespectful to the great scientist. They could not have been more wrong: when eventually it did appear, it became the most popular image of the originator of the theory of special relativity, and was an important early step towards popularizing science and making it accessible to lay audiences.

Einstein himself loved the image, and ordered nine prints of a cropped version that showed only his face, one of which he signed for a reporter who had been at the scene. The original print sold later at auction on June 19, 2009, for $74,324 (£59,843), a record for an Einstein picture. The photograph quickly became a universal symbol of the character of the original “nutty professor.” PL

“This gesture you will like, because it is aimed at all of humanity. A civilian can afford to do what no diplomat would dare.” Albert Einstein

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

1910s 395

RED DEER, CROYDON 1976 CHRIS STEELE-PERKINS Genre Documentary, Portrait Date 1976 Location Croydon, London, United Kingdom Format 35mm

The original Teddy Boys were part of the youthful counter-culture that emerged in Britain after World War II, and are often regarded as part of the vanguard of teenage rebellion. Their name derived from a shortened form of “Edward,” and referred to their sartorial code: frock coats and quiffs in the style that was fasionable during the reign of King Edward VII (1901–1910).

In the 1960s, subsequent waves of fashion— mods, rockers, hippies, skinheads—outmoded the 586 1970s

Teddy Boys, but the style experienced a revival in the mid-1970s, and it is this that Chris SteelePerkins (born 1947) chronicled in his photobook The Teds (1979).

The above image—the cover of the book— was taken in the Red Deer, a public house in Croydon, south London, which was one of the mustering points for new-wave Teds who hung out there in large numbers to dance, drink, smoke, and, not infrequently, fight.

Steele-Perkins’s work is documentary that takes the viewer beyond the dress code to reveal insights into the psychological and social elements of the Teds—as he puts it, “small worlds which have the whole world in them.” NG

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

YOUTH ON WALL CHRIS KILLIP Genre Documentary, Portrait, Street Date 1976 Location Jarrow, Tyneside, United Kingdom Format Large format

In 1970 Chris Killip (born 1946) used a large-format camera to photograph the people, architecture, and landscape of his native Isle of Man, with a focus on documenting the disappearing traditional Manx lifestyle. However, this project underwent a hiatus when he won a two-year fellowship to photograph communities in and around Newcastle upon Tyne in northeast England, and to document the effect on the region of the decline of shipbuilding, mining, and the steel industry.

Moving images such as Youth on Wall reek of despair and frustration. The young man’s cropped hair, oversize jacket, baggy pants, and large laced boots were fashionable—this is plainly a youngster who cares about his appearance. Yet, seeing him seated on a brick wall with his head on his hands, the viewer wonders what his future holds. His compressed body shape and bare head suggest the fetal position.

Killip’s picture captures the loss of purpose and hope that many in Britain felt in the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s, particularly the working class in areas affected by deindustrialization. It appeared in his photobook In Flagrante (1988). CK

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

1970s 587

RADIO CITY MUSIC HALL HIROSHI SUGIMOTO Genre Art, Documentary Date 1978 Location New York, New York, USA Format Large format

The idea behind the long-running Theatres series

by Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) is simple but striking: using a 4 x 5 camera and tripod, he makes a single exposure lasting for the whole length of a movie. In every image the result is a white screen, saturated with light, framed by the seating and architectural details of the cinema space. Often these are ornate and beautiful period buildings.

Sometimes—at outdoor drive-in venues—the background is the sky, in which the long exposure 594 1970s

time also registers the “movement” of stars and lingering jet streams. Sugimoto wrote: “Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: you get a shining screen. Immediately I sprang into action, experimenting toward realizing this vision. Dressed up as a tourist, I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture, and two hours later when the movie finished, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening, I developed the film, and the vision exploded behind my eyes.”

The pure absence of the white screen signifies the presence of both action and light: the two principal ingredients of cinematic experience. JG

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

UNTITLED FILM STILL #21 CINDY SHERMAN Genre Art Date 1978 Location Unknown Format Unknown

In her 1977–80 series Untitled Film Stills, Cindy Sherman (born 1954) created sixty-nine scenes in which she assumed the role of a movie heroine whom, because of the meticulous makeup, costume, lighting and set design, we feel we have seen before.

In fact, very few images in the series make direct reference to existing films. Rather, the work derives its power from the force of feminine stereotypes that have proliferated in American postwar cinema so extensively that they have become part of a shared

cultural imagination: the housewife, the bombshell, the femme fatale, the ingénue, the murder victim, and, here, the ambitious but uncertain career girl, into whose expression we can read any number of imagined plot lines. The image is a complex and ambiguous fiction, with Sherman performing the role of an actress performing the role of a character that has never existed but seems somehow familiar.

In the language of Hollywood cinema, this kind of shot—the close framing of a beautiful woman— typically signals that an act of violence is about to take place. Or maybe she is just concentrating, about to cross a busy street. There is no right answer.

Sherman’s series is celebrated as a work of feminist art. JG

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

1970s 595

MICHAEL PHELPS WINS THE GOLD MEDAL IN THE MEN’S 100M BUTTERFLY, BEIJING OLYMPICS HEINZ KLUETMEIER Genre Sport Date 2008 Location Beijing, China Format 35 mm

Heinz Kluetmeier (born 1943) is a legend of sports photography. He has shot more than 125 covers for Sports Illustrated magazine.

One of his specialities is the use of remotes to allow him to position his cameras in unusual spots to get unique angles: in the 1980 Olympics, he was one of the first to use the technique to capture the face of Sebastian Coe as he crossed the line to win the Men’s 1,500m. Then Kluetmeier was the only one using the idea; today, as he says: “You go 876 2000s

to the Olympics and there are like fifty remotes at the finish line.”

He used the same approach to freeze the precise moment when Michael Phelps’s fingertip touched the wall to win Olympic gold ahead of Serbian Milorad Čavić. It took Kluetmeier’s assistant in scuba gear almost one hour to position the camera underwater. Shooting eight frames a second, the motor-driven camera caught how Phelps actually came from behind. Kluetmeier remembers: “He was so lucky to win. Yes, he worked hard for years, he swam his butt off, but then he got lucky. The guy was drifting, and Michael got in one more stroke. I bet you it was less than hundredths.

I bet it was less than a heartbeat.” PL

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

HOME WORKS #3 MILES ALDRIDGE Genre Fashion Date 2008 Location Unknown Format Unknown

Miles Aldridge (born 1964) studied illustration at Central St. Martin’s in London. He then directed music videos before turning to photography. By the 1990s, he was a fashion photographer, working internationally for Vogue, GQ, and Harper’s Bazaar.

He also quickly rose to success with his commercial photography, shooting for fashion designers Armani and Paul Smith.

Unlike most fashion photographers, Aldridge is widely acknowledged as an artist in his own

right, and his work has been the subject of several international solo exhibitions.

Aldridge’s photographic style is almost instantly recognizable. The scenes he creates are perfect, highly artificial, and highly controlled environments in which the colors are hyper-real, and the models communicate a certain uneasy luxury. “I want to set a sort of unsettling message,” Aldridge has said. “But my trick is to sugarcoat it in these bright colors.”

The image reproduced here harks back to the 1950s in its psychedelic use of color, and the deadpan expression of the typical “Stepford wife” model—the latter is a feature of almost all of Aldridge’s photographs. LH

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

2000s 877

THIS IS WHAT HATRED DID CRISTINA DE MIDDEL Genre Documentary Date 2014 Location Lagos, Nigeria Format Unknown

Photojournalist Cristina de Middel (born 1975) became disenchanted with her assignments for Spanish newspapers, and resolved to approach her work in a completely different way.

Her breakthrough was Afronauts, a photoseries about the 1960s’ Zambian space program. She staged photographs of a man dressed in her interpretation of African space gear, posing in the desert. The work was such a refreshing angle on a little-known subject that the book (self-published 928 1910s

in 2012) quickly sold out and established her as a photographer who seeks reality through fiction.

This is What Hatred Did takes its title from the concluding line of Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954). In her series, de Middel reimagined the young boy in the novel who retreats from fighting and hides out in the bush where a series of magical and tragic events occur.

De Middel thought this the perfect simile for life in one of Lagos’s most notorious slums, Makoko.

She created mystical and dreamlike imagery that straddles both documentary and fiction to communicate this story and provide an antidote to the overwhelmingly negative media coverage of the slum. LH

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

SKULLS AND SEASHELLS DANIEL GORDON Genre Art, conceptual Date 2014 Location New York, New York, USA Format Digital composite

To create this dizzyingly complex image, Brooklynbased artist Daniel Gordon (born 1980) took photos from the Internet and then digitally manipulated them. In the process, he enhanced and printed the images to incorporate into an elaborate studio set resembling classic still-life compositions.

It takes some time to absorb all the individual elements of the image. The colors are intensified against the black-and-white background, and parts of the image bear striking similarities to

some of the paintings of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. The skull sits to the right of the center—a prominent memento mori.

The seashells lie scattered below. Looking at the image, we are invited to consider the future of the photographic image itself, as it becomes less and less of a physical object in the digital age, giving way to new forms of seeing and creating.

Gordon specializes increasingly in the use of photography to reject the transparency and clarity of the traditional picture plane. Instead he devises new, radical ways of presenting and viewing images. This photograph is selected from his acclaimed series Screen Selections and Still Lifes (2014). EC

© 2017 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved.

1910s 929