Alexander Rodchenko

“We don’t see what we’re looking at,” Rodchenko wrote in 1928. “We don’t see marvellous perspectives – foreshortening and the positioning of objects. We, who have been taught to see the inculcated, must discover the world of the visible. We must revolutionise our visual thinking.”
While Rodchenko led a revolution in the art of photography, he also used photography to promote social revolution in Bolshevik Russia. And therein lies his trouble—he weathered the contradictions and conflicts of being an independent, visionary artist who, in the end, was forced to stick to the party line or suffer.

In the early twenties, as a leader of the Russian Avant-garde and Constructivist movements, Rodchenko created art that celebrated the ideals of the Russian Revolution—art that was, in Rodchenko’s words: “the inventing or perfecting of something, rather than a reflection or portrayal.” When the original visions of a better society collapsed into a nightmare under Stalin, Rodchenko’s work was criticized as “bourgeois” and his career was sabotaged.

It is impossible to entirely separate Rodchenko’s revolutionary photography from the revolutionary times in which he worked—the two fed each other. Considered the most famous of Russian photographers of the first half of the twentieth century, Rodchenko, broke the mold of what was thought possible in photography. Already famous as a painter and sculptor, he bid farewell to these mediums in 1924 in order to forge a new visual vocabulary through photography.  

With his motto—“Our Duty is to Experiment!” he pioneered a language of bold and challenging camera angles; he was one of the first to widely use dramatic foreshortening and diagonal composition as well as unusual perspectives from above, beneath and behind the subject. “The most interesting visual angles today are from above down and from below up, and we should work at them,” he wrote, in 1928. “Who invented them—I don’t know. I would like to affirm these vantage points, expand them and get people used to them.”

From provincial Kazan, where he had attended art school from 1910 to 1914, Rodchenko moved to Moscow in 1915. He soon left his mark in the city’s artistic circle by showing his series of compass and ruler drawings at a small exhibition organised by the sculptor Vladimir Tatlin in 1916.

After the revolution, be became a leader of the incipient movement of Constructivism, a theory and practice that was derived largely from a series of debates amongst artists at the newly formed INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in Moscow, from 1920 to 1922.  A founding member of The First Working Group of Constructivists, Rodchenko would help define Constructivism as the combination of faktura: the particular material properties of an object, and tektonika, its spatial presence. He developed a practice of exploring a single formal artistic premise through a series of permutations—it was a practice that characterised his work throughout his career. For example, as a painter, he would single out separate qualities of painting, such as the texture or density of colour, and analyse them through a successive series of works.

Motivated by the values of the new Communist society, Rodchenko wanted art to be for everyone—the proletariat and the farmer as well as the educated and urbane. A talented designer as well as photographer, he dedicated himself to the creation of propaganda posters, book design and advertisements that supported state-owned enterprises.  Good art and design should be everywhere, not just in galleries and museums.

His design was simple, modern, streamlined. He wrote, “Through design one needs to unveil not the decorative and situational aspect of the thing, but its practical use, its utilitarian value, its unexpected clarity, the beauty of construction, its simplified (rational) production and practicality.” Ironically, the strong designs of his Communist advertisement—geometrical and typified by his bold blockish font—were soon emulated in capitalist advertising elsewhere. Communist propaganda inspired capitalist advertisements abroad.

As Stalin tightened his fist around Communist Russia, most of the truly innovative artists lost their freedom to create. In 1932, the communist party banned all artistic groups and created a single artists union under Party control. Two years later, the Party established Socialist Realism as the only officially sanctioned art style. Rodchenko lost his job at one of the disbanded art institutes and later was disallowed from photographing without a permit. He was only allowed to take documentary propaganda photos and a few personal ones of his wife, Varvara Stepanova and their daughter, Varvara Rodchenko.

As Rodchenko wrote in 1935, “My creative path has not been easy, but it is clear to me who I was and what I want. I am certain that in the future I will make genuine Soviet works.” The revolution that inspired Rodchenko to pioneer a limitless new world for photography in the twentieth century would eventually become the controlling machine that would take away his freedom.

But, all was not lost. Like the leading characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in the end, when the politics proved disillusioning, he delved deeper into his happy domestic life. As Olga Sviblova, the director of the Moscow House of Photography Museum writes, “Alexander Rodchenko was nevertheless a very fortunate man. He had a family: his friend and comrade-in-arms Varvara Stepanova, his daughter Varvara Rodchenko, her husband Nikolay Lavrentiev, his grandson Alexander Lavrentiev and his family, a small, but very close-knit clan charged with creative energy. If it had not been for this family, Russia’s first photographic museum, the Moscow House of Photography, might never have appeared. In Rodchenko’s house, together with the Rodchenko family, we have discovered and studied the history of Russian photography, which would be unthinkable without Alexander Mikhailovich Rodchenko.”

TEXT BY CLAYTON MAXWELL

© picture: Alexander Rodchenko’s Archive
Caricature Showing Osip Brik, variant of a cover for LEF Magazine, 1924, Gelatin-silver print, 24,2 x 17,9 cm
Private collection © Rodchenko’s Archive / 2011, ProLitteris, Zurich

Courtesy:
Moscow House of Photography
Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow
Government of Moscow
Fotomuseum Winterthur

The Cold War in a Trash Bag

Ukraine’s geographical immensity – over 603,600 square metres – makes it the largest contiguous country on the European continent. While neighbouring Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia to the west, Belarus to the northwest, and Romania and Moldova to the southwest, its eastern and northeastern plains meet the borderlands of Russia. But even today certain periods of the country’s early history cast shadows over its impressive geography.

After undergoing numerous changes of leadership since the 14th century, Ukraine suffered divisions of its territories under the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. For years this instigated warlike scrimmages, likewise failed attempts at attaining independence, en route to Ukraine becoming one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union in 1922. Less than 20 years later, however, as the stage for a Nazi campaign against the Soviet Union, the capital city Kiev became the site for a massacre of Jews, whose bodies were dumped by the hundreds of thousands into the Babi Yar ravine. More years of warfare followed. In 1945 the Ukrainian SSR became a founding member of the United Nations, and 46 years later, after the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the country gained its independence in 1991. But during the years preceding independence Ukraine was the main arena in which Moscow and Washington fought their Cold War – a state of political-military unrest and overt economic competitiveness between the Communist and Western worlds, spanning from 1946 to 1991.

If one were to condense and indeed estrange the aforementioned data by putting it inside a trash bag – in the form of 10,000 black-and-white negatives found in a former newspaper building and later developed to images of people and events during Ukraine’s Cold War period – this would give a rough idea of the multifaceted allure of The Cold War in a Trash Bag, Burkhard von Harder’s photo-project initiated in Ukraine and completed in Germany.

For this project the German photographer, also a filmmaker, functions as a visual worker on two counts: a photo-researcher armed with digital technologies and a photo-artist likewise an objet trouvé (“found object”) collector. Fundamentally, Von Harder points out to viewers that the Ukrainian “intel” culminates in reflections on memory’s role in the perception of history, and that it subscribes to the notion of a great archive, which gathers together many different types of documentation and knowledge. In the photographer’s exciting book presentation of the Ukrainian images – namely a POD (Print on Demand) book, a popular self-publishing format – the sense of an archive initiates a series of philosophical and non-political debates. Von Harder’s photo-project gives rise to the kind of 20th century vanguard thinking that elevates such endeavours to what Foucault deemed a “repository of memory and the fundamental building-block of the present”. Currently, projects of this kind qualify as advancements in the field of artistic research. And Von Harder’s artistic research transpires on three levels at the same time: privately, publicly, and by chance.  

In 2010, in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, when Von Harder entered the attic of a large, deserted building – that is, deserted save the studio spaces of a young fashion photographer and two rappers on one of the floors below – he discovered an abandoned “archive”. Riddled with cracks yet structurally sound, the building begged to be explored. And the photographers did so. While rummaging through the attic, they found several negatives scattered over the floor. This was only the beginning of their find. As they continued exploring the premises, they found more negatives strewn about the space, and their number rose to the thousands – all of them unprotected, left to waste, and in poor condition. Bagging the celluloid scraps and bringing them to Germany posed no problem. Thanks to forthcoming representatives from Ukrainian cultural agencies and museums, Von Harder could cross border after border with the deteriorating material and finally subject it to post-production and image-making processes in his own country.  

The found images of Von Harder’s Cold War photo-project build an archive at once nostalgic, anonymous, and hard to explain. While appearing to capture local Ukrainian citizens from every walk of life, they make unexpected departures into what seem like rigid political situations and equally rigid cultural ones. Intended or not, an offbeat humour wafts from the men’s East bloc attire and (Western) “Monkees” hairstyles, and the specific charm of the made-up, young women was probably never catalogued in any Western manual of style from that period. But private and public auras aside, what reigns is the overall visual quality and suggested cinematic patina. Moreover, apart from being pieces of photojournalism shot by unknown photographers, the images seem twice removed from the reality of most viewers: once for documenting an unknown culture, and again for documenting that culture under the influence of a unique time period. This is where Harder’s project shines brightest: when it welcomes the gaze of viewers unfamiliar with Ukrainian history and Cold War details. With digitalised inventions of his own design, he captures what he calls the “zero hour” between Communism and independence in Ukraine – and goes on to take full advantage of this archive: by evoking an entirely new archive from an old.  

Von Harder’s love of image-making salvages found material as well as encourages viewers to construct mental archives of their own. To work with such humane if inconsistent images would be thoroughly enjoyable, were it not for the disturbing ebb and flow underneath: the sometimes tranquil, sometimes exploding picture surfaces. In unpredictable waves, many of these remarkably sober portraits and documented events become electrified by photo-corruption that bedazzles the picture frame like crude Christmas decorations. These visual intrusions leave the simplest of social situations over-dramatized by the likes of superimposed star constellations and gelatinous forms fringed with roughness, or by amoebic shapes almost close-ups of bacteria and surface abrasions resembling knife wounds when developed. Where corruption overpowers the image the implied documenting of a Communist society dissolves to the hazy psychodrama of a de-politicized European anywhere.   
         
In Von Harder’s own words, his weeks spent visiting Vinnytsia reminded him of life in a small town in Southern Germany, a remark which significantly links with many of his previous projects, especially those he describes as “family research with artistic inclinations.” Such projects focus on researching and discovering private histories, and, in relation to World War II, flushing out human and political sympathies as well. In general, they chart the movements of family members in given time periods and locations. In his Cold War project, however, Von Harder’s interests feel more historical than familial (more European than German), and appear directed at a series of Ukrainian impressions in the name of archive production. What comes to mind is the inventiveness of Von Harder’s 2009 multimedia project Resurrection of Memory.

While keeping a chilly distance from human forms, the cinematography of Von Harder’s film The Scar anticipates the archival state of mind of his Cold War project. If nothing else, its scenes reflect and reflect upon a presence beyond memory as well, while appealing to photography’s convincing ability to present a possible truth or memory. And, via quotes and descriptions, Von Harder also reminds viewers of the new concept of memory at large today – as posted in the 2011 call for submissions to a video project sponsored by the Studio Marangoni and the Celeste Network: “[…] memory as a repository of a single, absolute truth, has been replaced in our information age by the notion of many memories: micro-truths without universal authenticity […]” Concepts of this calibre influence so-called history production and trigger an engaging, cultural phenomenon in the here and now. They serve to remind us that popular philosophy – with theories by the likes of Derrida, Foucault, and Wittgenstein – is bejewelled with notions focused on what the archive is capable of.         
       
But when considering Von Harder’s intuitive, less analytical side – the part of his thinking receptive to the idea of technical errors aiding the creative process – an entirely different visual theatre materialises. (Was it not Derrida who implied that well-executed failures have more value than successes?) As narratives, the pockmarked photographic images suggest the choppy, psychological playfulness of Hans Richter’s experimental film Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), the crowning difference being that they never lose track of real social criticism. Furthermore, the Cold War images surpass the initial fascination with the objet trouvé, point to a sense of private theatre, and welcome discussions on art movements like Art Brut, Art Informel, and other strains of Raw Art. Along these lines it fascinates how Von Harder’s digital processing transforms photo-corruption imported from Ukraine into photographic “abstract painting”. In certain exposures the accumulations of shapes and distortions ravage the images like a photographic leprosy, leaving viewers little to grasp in the way of “classic” black-and-white prints. Instead, the photograph is reduced to an artwork shaped by deleted references to time and place: a pseudo-social vision trapped in strange nets made of blurs and scratches. Ultimately, if the intention is to research the face of Ukraine’s Cold War period via a single location, the alter ego of the undertaking is surely this painterly implosion of content and imagery. In addition, its jarring appearance corresponds with Harder’s ongoing interest in expressing the hidden layers and concealed aspects of his subject matter.      

In the image-making process it hardly surprises that these pictures recall Germany’s history, along with the massive German word Vergangenheitsbewältigung, meaning “the activity of coming to terms with the past”. In this case, however, what applies most is coming to terms with national unity, invisible divisions, and European integration. With these issues in mind, the depictions of what might be party members posing for ID shots or simply relaxing, scenes boasting Communist artefacts in the background, and images of nervous schoolchildren beside heavily-decorated officials do, in fact, recall some of the political fanfare and social peculiarities of the former GDR. In this context, many “classic” East bloc likewise Cold War details seem challenged by a kind of political Down’s Syndrome, which produces a recurring “look” based on specific types of clothing, objects, and architecture – on characteristics that could only come about under such “Eastern” conditions.

Just the same, the project’s artistic accent is much stronger than its political one. For that reason too, the Cold War images frequently submit to the photographer’s artistic, slight of hand. Von Harder thoughtfully couples or separates his subjects and found models. He juxtaposes the negative and positive images of the same exposure within a single “book spread”. He structures the composition using the fierce-looking scars in the film material, and gives as much weight to a private or official gathering as he does to a playfully solarized shot of proud bodybuilders sitting, squatting, and standing in rows before the camera.

Most significantly, perhaps, Von Harder presents the found Ukrainian material in photographic duets. This clearly adds to the prevalence of research, as if he were telling viewers that the photographic moment is being “studied” from two vantage points at once. (Even photographs Von Harder couples with empty spaces somehow fall into this research-friendly category.) This contrived, doubled oneness presents simple portraits and images taxed with photo-corruption side-by-side, but also offers viewers a potential “before and after” situation – or better still, an archival “then and now”. The latter situation surpasses the former if only because Von Harder’s projects are always so exquisitely constructed in the here and now.  

TEXT BY KARL E. JOHNSON

District II

Streets of downtown D.C. through the lenses of ,
Chris Earnshaw: Billy Luck’s Downtown
Joseph Mills: Inner City

The Historical Society of Washington, D.C.
Carnegie Library, 801 K St NW, Washington, DC 20001

When I encounter decay, I have tried extremely hard, to bring out the underlying beauty, however faint, in the wreck at hand. It was quite amazing that I could 'lose myself' that way and still return to a qualified version of reality. Chris Earnshaw

This is "the edge of horror and beauty." Earnshaw's world was outside of himself, where mine was internal. One could just as well have read the book title as possessive, Joseph Mills' Inner City, for that was the world I was lost in, locked in, unable to exit, attempting then, only to find the company of like lost souls. All this having very little to do with the city itself.
Not until decades past, and one witnessed the moulting of the DC's scared facade, and the healing of those scares internal, that the images became "important" as documents of that which is external.
Someone said, "the eye sees better then the mind." For both Chris and I, it has taken a very long time to recognize that which our eyes had already known many years ago, having to mature deeply, in order to see the marvels our eyes had already captured when we were so young.

I shun the limelight rather than seek it...getting recognition is not really something that matters much anymore. C.E.

Anonimity, the artist's best friend. Think of Kafka, Van Gogh, and Earnshaw's mentor Atget, and Earnshaw himself. It is certainly no coincedence that their purity of heart and soul, that will eternally emanate from their work, walked hand-in-hand with that closest of companions.

TEXT BY JOSEPH MILLS

Dilip Vishwamitra Bhatia

Happy Home and School For The Blind

Dilip Bhatia series depicts young boys in the midst of their daily activities at a large boarding school in the photographer’s native India. The photographs are moving and life affirming, with children smiling in almost every picture and bursting with a genuine, happy energy that seems to spill out of each frame. Bhatia’s use of a selective depth of field creates an intimacy that emphasizes the spirit of these boys as individuals. Though this school is undoubtedly a strong and nurturing community, as seen so clearly in the photographs, it is the personal experience of each boy that comes through to touch the heart. Bhatia’s ability to capture this essence is what makes his photographs exceptional.

Dilip Bhatia currently lives in Mumbai, India, where he works on both commercial and fine art photography. An alumnus of the Brooks Institute of Photography, Bhatia established the D Studio N Gallery in South Mumbai and has worked as a photographer in the advertising, fashion, and film industries in India for fifteen years. EYEMAZING spoke with the photographer.

Heather Snider: Can you tell us about how you became involved in this project?

Dilip Bhatia: My brother Kumar was making a commercial film involving seven visually impaired children and these kids were from The Happy Home and School for the Blind. I was to do his movie’s publicity pictures, so I was able to interact with the kids and that’s when the birth of the series happened. When I expressed my desire to do the pictures to the Dean of the school, Ms Banaji, she was kind enough to let me do it.

HS: How would you describe the program or the kind of instruction they receive at The Happy Home?
 
DB: They are treated and taught like all other normal kids; only certain techniques are used so as to make the learning convenient for them. Special importance is given to learning different crafts such as pottery, mosaic, hand weaving, and music so they can be taken as career options later. Most of the children come from not very affluent backgrounds, or situations where the parents cannot give them the time and attention required. The majority of them live at The Happy Home from Monday to Friday and then go to their homes for the weekends.

HS: Would you say that the series is about The Happy Home and School for the Blind in particular, or is it a general statement about blind children, their schooling, or their community?

DP: This was a specific series for The Happy Home, not a statement for visually impaired children in general.

HS: It appears that the school is only for boys; is there a separate girls’ school? Is it common practice in India to separate boys from girls at school? And if so, did you ever visit a girls’ school?

DP: That’s a good question. Subconsciously this question has popped into my mind so many times and I’ve meant to address it, but I never did ask the authorities. Yes, it’s an all boys’ school but that is not really the norm, we do have co-education schools. I do not know about a girls’ school, but will surely find out now…and if there is one I would love to do something new with them.

HS: For how long did you work on the series? And how did you know when you were done or the series was complete?

DP: I worked about twelve days or so, and trust me you can never be done with such a series. I hope to eventually make a book. For the time being, I stopped after I could give the school enough pictures for their brochure and have a few for me to cherish forever.

HS: How many photographs did you take and what was the editing process like? Was it different in any significant way from editing other work?

DP: I shot hundreds of images because, besides my series, I was also doing pictures that the school could use for their brochure. My editing process is very simple… it’s a yes or no… either a picture works or it does not. The pictures in this case had to have that little “it” factor.

HS: Were there differences you felt in photographing people who can’t see in comparison to photographing sighted people? Do you think that you looked at them differently, or that they see themselves and their environment differently than sighted people do?

DB: This is a wonderful question. Well, to start off, I felt heavy and sympathetic within…towards these kids... to be born as humans and then to be deprived of the right to see the world in its entirety. What we just take for granted—vision and all around us in its proper form—is a mystery to them. So naturally, I felt more caring and loving towards them than I would be in other circumstances. But as I started shooting these kids and got to know them more they put me at ease with their self-assured, normal and, most importantly, happy behaviour. They were so eager and enthusiastic to be photographed that it became a pleasure to shoot them.
I have to narrate one of the first incidents. After taking my first few shots, I excused myself and went to the computer to see the images and make sure everything was OK. When they found out what I was doing, they all rushed to the monitor and gathered around it. Each of them would then ask me where they were and how they were looking! They had me in tears with their enthusiasm. The beauty was that they were oblivious to the camera hence every image looks candid.

HS: Did you think about or look at other well-known photographs of blind subjects? Some that come to mind are photographs by Paul Strand, August Sander, Jed Fielding, Mary Ellen Mark, and several Life magazine features.

DB: To be very honest I did not look at any other work of a similar subject… I would definitely look these works up now. In a way it’s good because great work always stays in the subconscious and comes out somewhere! Mine was a reaction to what I saw. I did not go with set pictures in my mind.

HS: Your use of black-and-white for this series suggests a timeless element and a connection to historical photography, was this intentional?

DB: Very, very intentional. Black-and-white is my weakness. Most of my other series and landscapes are in black-and-white. In this case, it helps the emotional quality to come out better, it gives the pictures more depth. Colour would have been a distraction from what I was trying to say.  

HS: Most of the images appear to be spontaneous, taken in the midst of daily activity, while others were obviously constructed in cooperation with the boys. Can you describe working in these two different modes?

DP: The only difference in creating the constructed ones was that I was looking at a concept or a result, so my approach was different. I was getting what I had in mind as opposed to seeing something good and clicking it. As far as the kids were concerned there was no difference; either way they were not aware of my being there. And when they were aware, they did not know when I was going to click, hence the result is still candid.

HS: The most obvious example of a constructed photograph is one titled E which shows three boys enacting the proverb of: “See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil.” What is the story behind this one? What did you want to communicate with this photograph?

DP: This is a lovely one. All through my growing years somewhere or other we would see the three monkeys enacting the proverb…See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil…in various forms such as artefacts, wooden statues, etc. So somewhere along the way it was engraved in the mind. That particular day, while photographing the kids, I was just pondering about what could be good or an advantage of being visually impaired. It struck me then that these kids are spared from seeing all the wrong, scary things happening around us in the world and that they do not get to see any evil. So the three monkeys came into action. In this case, I staged the shot with three kids and of course the blind one did not have to block his eyes. While doing so I asked him to sing a song for me and enjoy it, so he almost was clapping “I see no evil”...ha, ha, ha.

HS: One of the most striking aspects of the series as a whole is the feeling of happiness that comes through, the sense of a healthy and vibrant community at the school. Did you sense this from the beginning? Was it something you discovered along the way?

DP: The name of the school is The Happy Home so at the back of my mind I wanted to keep the pictures “happy.” When I started clicking it became even happier as the kids were so positive, not for a moment did they ask for sympathy or help. They were very cordial and jovial and respectful. This resulted in most of the pictures giving a feeling of happiness and positivity.

HS: Was this happiness the overall feeling you were left with after doing the series?

DP: The one main thing that I learnt from these kids in the time I spent with them was that not once did they complain or ask for sympathy. The next time I meet someone less fortunate, I’ll know not to automatically treat them as such, because these kids, no matter the graveness of their problems, held their head high and kept their spirits up. One should support that and not be preoccupied by what they don’t have. I also learnt that most of the rest of us need to stop complaining because not once did I see any of these kids complain about what they did not possess: vision.

TEXT BY HEATHER SNIDER

© Picture by DilipVishwamitra Bhatia

Ed van der Elsken at the Stedelijk Museum

Camera in Love

Ed van der Elsken
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
4 February – 21 May 2017

During his lifetime, Ed van der Elsken (1925-1990) produced over twenty photographic books and dozens of films, in addition to a vast body of photography. In this survey, the largest to be staged in a quarter of a century, his oeuvre is revealed through his books and films, paired with dummies and notes that share his process.  Also featured are prints produced by van der Elsken himself, some with the aura he often created around the heads of his subjects.

Ed van der Elsken was a world traveller, a stalker of subjects and stories who favoured a cinematic approach to image-making. He captured scenes and people with an improvisational verve, often inserting himself into the narrative. Van der Elsken came to prominence with his series of images published as Love on the Left Bank, ‘a story in photographs about Paris’. In what was a new genre of photo book, Ed van der Elsken told the semi-fictional tale of Anne (played by dancer, muse and artist Vali Myers) and her Mexican lover. Myers, referred to by Patti Smith as the ultimate beatnik, was perhaps in some ways a feminine expression of van der Elsken’s raw, earthy nature. Myers eventually leaves Paris for the serenity or rural Italy where she paints and draws, surrounded by friends and a colony of animals. Years later, van der Elsken reconnects with Vali in the film Death in the Port Jackson Hotel where she talks of the Paris years – former friends who committed suicide, overdosed, or were committed to a mental institution, and her addiction to opium. Vali’s intensity, a hedonism edged with tragedy, is evident also in van der Elsken’s filmic and photographic work – in his ceaseless urge to embrace the world, in his restless uncontained energy and appetite to feel, see and experience.

The stories that he told were multi-layered – exuberance, passion, languor are embedded there, but death and suffering are never far away. In the early ‘60s, when he fails to find a publisher for his book Sweet Life (the chronicle of his 14-month journey around the world, together with his wife, Gerda van der Veen) a disillusioned van der Elsken resolves to devote himself to film. And begins to tweak his film camera, attaching microphones and batteries with tape and lengths of stick so he can film alone, and for longer, and record sound in sync with image. In My Amsterdam, armed with one of his home-made go pro camera forbears, the filmmaker takes to the streets, driving crazily through run down parts of Amsterdam – former Jewish neighbourhoods that fell into decay during the war years, when inhabitants were rounded up en masse and transported to concentration camps. My Amsterdam reveals van der Elsken’s unconventional, highly personal style – his seemingly unscripted commentary as he hurtles through empty half-demolished streets: streets he loves, streets that he calls home.

This extensive exhibition is a treat for lovers of van der Elsken, and of street photography in general. Aside from the display of vintage prints, dummies, the immersive presentation of his films, and slide and sound installations, this presentation shares something of van der Elsken’s essence. Vali may have been addicted once to opiates, but van der Elsken’s addiction was the camera. He chronicled his world, his city, his family and his final months. He wanted to see beyond the surface of the everyday and the camera allowed him to do that – he wanted to show the world to us, to show himself to the world. His final words on camera were: “Show the world who you are.”

TEXT BY: Lisa Holden

picture: Ed van der Elsken, Vali Myers with cigarette, Paris (1953) Nederlands Fotomuseum / © Ed van der Elsken / Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Courtesy Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
www.stedelijk.nl

Evgeny Mokhorev

Games Children Play

The St. Petersburg photographer Evgeny Mokhorev, photographs the disturbing world of homeless youth. He presents an intense account of troubled childhood, as it is lived in the shelters, orphanages and squats that mushroomed as a consequence of the political turmoil of the 1990s. His black and white images impel by the anxious eyes and fragile bodies of children that are etched in the memory for a long time. Eyemazing gets the inside story of Mokhorev's approach to his medium, his influences and the motivation behind the body of photographs Games Children Play that were originally exhibited at the Changing Reality: Recent Soviet Photography exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 1991.

Now in his 40s, Mokhorev was not alone among the Russian photographers who addressed the despair of people situated on the societal fringes during the waning days of the Soviet regime. Sergey Bratkov, Yuri Mukhin and Nikolay Bakharev documented the ironic and poignant scraps of life that were hidden or banned from official culture.
All of them derived from the boom of amateur photography in the post-war communist Soviet Union, and counted Boris Mikhailov’s now-classic images as prototypes.

In 1988 Mokhorev’s milieu in St. Petersburg evolved out of contact with the photo club Zerkalo (Mirror), which was frequented by a group of photographers, but also jazz musicians, poets and intellectuals. It was a tight knit circle of artists who, although amateurs, scrambled to learn from each other during the discussions, exhibitions, concerts and readings that they held. This atmosphere of camaraderie was very productive for people searching for self-expression in a time when an ideology of the collective subsumed the individual. Photography was only one medium that assured documentation of real life from an individual perspective, bearing simultaneously an objective and subjective approach, as well as an official and non-official slant. The stimulating environment of Zerkalo was instrumental in the first steps of Mokhorev’s photographic journey, at a time when resources for education such as books or magazines were not getting through the Iron Curtain. The artists then relied on a peer-review type of critique or group brainstorming when commencing on a new direction or theme.

Overall photography in Russia went through a process of transformation after the end of Socialism in the 1990s. It was able to find its place in the field of art following on the example of Western standards, but with new tendencies regarding form and content which quickly surpassed painting in terms of modernity. The 90s were marked by this seemingly radical change. On one hand, many photographers looked back to the language of the avant-garde, including reportage or even the Constructivism of Rodchenko’s photography. On the other hand, they were fascinated by the possibilities of staged photography that emerged once the photo magazines started to arrive from the West. The artists also embarked on staged landscape photography, tableaux vivant, and documentary and action photography.

A particular genre, that was a fusion of a documentary, staged photography and social critique emerged along with themes that had previously been restricted. Ironically, homeless children, vagrants, prostitutes, frozen corpses, drunkards, right wing radical hooligans, as well as wretched old women became photogenic. They were ready for the immediate use of photographers. Mokhorev, a soft-spoken, tall man with the haunting looks of the Russian Silver Age elite, does not exploit his subject’s depravity but implies a humanistic approach speaking about their needs.

Yulia Tikhonova: Childhood and adolescence are the focus of your photo practice: forlorn bodies, thin, and tattooed but mostly children’s eyes, probing and questioning about the outside world. What was the starting point for the Games Children Play?

Evgeni Mokhorev: My first encounter with children took place in 1990 to1991 when a group of musicians and my friends invited me to a shelter for homeless kids. I was hit by the brutality of the environment that they lived in after being fetched from abuse, sickness and hunger. Their faces however retained a curiosity for life, revealing the fragility and naivety of their personas.

It was in the beginning of the 1990s when the squats started to be filled with the children. Once the Socialist system crashed in 1992 and the brutal market economy was introduced, many children became homeless, after their parents sold a family apartment for the cash needed to feed their drinking addiction or simply to survive in difficult economic circumstances. Many kids ran away from their drunken parents. At that time a myriad of stray dogs also flooded the streets of the city. Ruthless capitalism kicked out the weakest first; that were unable to be fed and children became homeless too.

YT: Do you remember some of the individual stories?

EM: Yes, I met 15-year old Sergey who lived in a basement with his four-year-old sister for three years because his mother had sold their apartment to buy alcohol. He eventually went to the police and asked for shelter. The police also brought two 12-year-old sisters who were arrested for stealing. They had lived on the streets playing musical instruments for money since they were six. Neither was able to read or write. Many conversations were devastating to hear and went something like this:
Does you mom drink? … Yes, and so what? ... Some times she gives me a try…. No, I don’t like it... But to ‘sniff’ the glue–this is cool…when I sniff the funny visions in my head come alive, something like animations…you know. It’s ‘ok’ to live in basements, and even more fun when the central heating pipes are hot…. Yesterday, one dick jugged Sashka, he is in a hospital now…Bath? No I did not have one…why bother?

YT: In St. Petersburg I was shocked to see how the wealth contrasts with the dire situation of many young homeless. The stereotype of a homeless child sniffing glue is very common there, especially in the winter, when glue sniffing is more prevalent. It gives street kids a sense of warmth and banishes their hunger. The facts of cold statistics report that recent poverty and social crises have orphaned more than 700,000 kids, as their parents went either to prison, succumbed to abuse, or otherwise became incapable of providing a home.

EM: Although I was interested in each inhabitant of the shelter, I understood that I would not be able to photograph everyone. And this was not my agenda. I wanted to tell about the extremity of the kids’ situation, their life conflict that is very tangible. Their trauma is also photogenic (in a humane sense of this word of course). An image of a skinny child pressed against the metal headboard of a bed, communicates a tragic message: this child is in danger. The image is haunting and may be even seen as erotic.

YT: Do you think that your images imply erotic references?

EM: Well… This question should be asked of a psychologist or sexologist, upon seeing my pictures. I am only a photographer. When I shoot the images I do not aim to present the kids in any sexual way. Yes, I depict their naked bodies but I try to avoid overt sensual suggestions, and I am not concerned with their sexuality. Let me tell you that the image Maxim with the Doll (2002) was shot with the permission of a correction police officer in one of the shelters. When the boy was showing his photo around I asked him, “Don’t you feel shy to see yourself tattooed here?” He replied, “Tattooed and naked is not me, but the person who shot the photo.”

YT: This is a very interesting observation…it seems that kids do not see themselves as they are in reality: vulnerable, deprived and wretched.

EM: Exactly, I was deeply shaken to learn how fast kids assimilate into the environment of a squat and that it almost became a second home and a convenient form of existence. Perhaps they consider a shelter as a sort of play or violent spectacle where they can re-enact the roles, which they observed in real life. Even their games are violent: they fight with guns, pretending to shoot one another, they slap, kick or impose other forms of violence. This is what they have learned–the power governs everything. An image of Anton with a gun from 1992 became iconic; it was used for the cover of Victor Pelevin’s book Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, which presented a satirical and erotic allegory of the post-Soviet and post-9/11 world.

YT: Can you tell me about the methods of working with children in front of the camera which you use?

EM : This is not easy work for two reasons. Kids often don’t have any taboos and ingrained skepticism yet. They want to try everything that’s new and are keen to participate in the game of photographing which I suggest. But kids also don’t have any boundaries and limitations—they can easily freak out and refuse to shoot for good. I have to deal with both maneuvering between their personalities and my concept. It’s very important for me to involve my protagonists in the creative process and prove to them that the end result, the photograph, is dependent on them as much as it relies on my skills as a photographer. The way they look, the gestures and movement of the body, determines the expressive qualities of the photographs. I am here merely to document their momentary expression of personality. And once my model takes on the role of co-author of the piece, then things start happening in the picture.

YT: But what is really happening…could you elaborate?

EM: I am very interested in the pictorial qualities of photography, and uses of light, metaphorically as well as literally. And if the photograph is “a painting by shadows” then I choose to paint or sculpt my objects with shadows. For instance, by sharpening the contrast between the figures and background, I stress the disconnection of kids from their environment, thus generating a viewer’s empathy with the subject’s. On several images, I blur the borders of the image rendering an effect of an aged image to communicate the psychological relationships with society and their peer's experience of growing up.

YT: Do you see yourself when you photograph these kids, or in other words are these images reflective of your childhood?

EM: My childhood was different. The two decades that separate me from my protagonists were pivotal in Russian history. I was brought up in the relatively safe environment of the final years of Socialism. Our life standards were very modest but we still had a roof over our heads and had no doubts that this life would be forever. These kids are different as they came out of the historical turmoil, which swept the country in the 1990s. Victims of the severe economic crash and moral decline, these children have seen nothing better than lawless resolutions and the power of abuse. What they lived through, no adult would wish to experience. It's not surprising that they assume the current environment as the right model to follow. Many of them got involved in crime, prostitution and drugs. All this said, both generations have a lot in common—we played the same games with pistols and wars, we developed in a similar way as shy, lean and fragile kids–victims of adult cruelty.

YT: Was it a form of play when you started shooting pictures at eight years of age?

EM: Well…yes I got my camera and this was the start of everything I do now. I am a full time photographer. Although I came from a working class family who had no interest in art, I was fortunate to meet several peers at the photo-club Zerkalo (Mirror), which existed in St. Petersburg since the mid 70s. The club was a starting point in my exploration of life through the viewfinder, and at that time I knew that I was drawn towards an inner world of children and teenagers portrayed in their social environment. Nailya Alexander, the owner of the Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York, described my trajectory as a conscious progression from the late 1980s photographs of street kids, to recent work that stripped away the social context but focused on deeper cause of reflection.
YT: Alexander also said "Mokhorev is the only artist in Russia who took upon himself to portray the most fragile and vulnerable part of society–children and teenagers. Through his images one can follow the tumultuous painful transition of post Soviet society."
EM: I had two shows in her 57th Street gallery location: The 26th Element in 2007 and Ambiguous Desires in 2008. She commented on the originality of the multi-layered connotations that explore both marginal territories, and map the magical transition of adolescence, that constituted my approach in the recent years.

TEXT BY YULIA TIKHONOVA
©picture Evgeny Mokhorev

Stephane Graff

According to Albert Einstein: “Imagination is greater than knowledge.” This is because the line between imagination and intuitive insight is very fine, or even porous. If a scientific solution can be flowing from one's intuition, then imagination can act as its container or vessel. Just as poets have their muses, the process of scientific discovery is not dissimilar to the practice of contemporary artists.
 In the photograph titled Regarding Picasso a naked female subject appears in Professore’s nineteenth century laboratory. Metaphorically, she can be seen as this vessel entering the artist /scientist’s psyche. Her distorted face is reflected though a glass jar filled with an unknown solution. Einstein also stated: “The most important decision you will ever make is whether the universe is friendly or hostile.” It thus feels very natural for a female subject to be Testing the water in the Professore’s lab, by slowly dipping her foot into the liquid.  

Is Professore really reliable? Can the archetypal mad scientist be trusted?  Stephane Graff has created an alter-ego that oscillates between the extremes of experience and uncertainty, control and failure, or genius and insanity. He treats Professore with a degree of humour, whilst affirming the character’s quest to expand our knowledge and thus make the universe appear friendlier.  
But Professore might not inspire our full confidence when we find him wearing a strange helmet connected to some vintage electronic devices in Unnatural ways to feel good about yourself. We are similarly perplexed witnessing his electrostatic crystal spiked device in Moral animal. Despite our suspicions of this eccentric character, we are still prepared to blindly drink the “scientific solution” as does the woman in Water therapy.  This highlights Graff’s aim in creating Professore. He clearly wants to question society’s innate trust in science and institutions. Our sense of confusion is emphasised by the fact that Graff deliberately blurs the distinction between reality and fiction. His photographs often have a painterly quality to them, incorporating nineteenth century techniques, as is the case in What’s the grey matter? or Untitled (nude with the grid). His ingenious printing skills are frequently achieved with long exposures onto glass plates and by processing chemicals that he prepares to his own recipe. As a result, this helps Professore to project the qualities of a well-respected and highly educated scientist—the authority figure towards which we find ourselves gravitating.  

As a society we have become too obedient towards our physicians and scientific institutions. We have lost our discernment and disconnected ourselves from our self–healing abilities. As a result, this has made us more prone to addictive behaviour, which manifests in society’s increasing dependence in prescription pills and medications. In this regard, Professore’s attempt in Monitoring addicted personalities, in which the female subject is holding a “chain smoking” device, appears as one of his most absurd experiments.  
Superficially, we seem to be encouraged by the seemingly benevolent scientist examining his patients, as in Anatomy study, or Assert your true potential (stress levels). But in truth, we have evidently surrendered our own healing capacities. The doctor within us finds himself caged behind the bars of scientific dogmas, just as the muse appears to be trapped behind a giant numeric grid in Untitled (nude with the grid).  
Behind the mask of this Clouseau of science, Graff addresses Einstein’s question in all seriousness and seems to be suggesting the following answer: When science manifests a deeper respect towards nature (and primarily human nature), and takes into consideration the limitation of resources, the universe will finally become much more friendly.   There was a time in the past when science and reverence for the human soul were interlinked. It took the form of the ancient art of Alchemy. Symbolically, some of the reference materials that Graff incorporates in his Musée Imaginaire are inspired by actual medical and scientific experiments of these earlier eras.  
A parallel can be drawn here with the nineteenth-century author Edgar Allan Poe, who believed that the realm of spirit and the domain of science should be united. Professore could have been a protagonist in some of Poe’s novels, like Conversation with a Mummy or The system of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether. Most likely, just like in Graff’s body of work, Professore would have been instrumental in expressing Poe’s deepest intuitions and metaphysical truths, such as his deep belief in life after death.  

In his earliest experiments, Professore was trying to record and decode the voice of plants, (Advanced techniques in Communication—Tell me if you are thirsty?). He certainly entertained the possibility of consciousness in all living things, as did the ancient alchemists as they were shedding light on the unsolved mysteries of the universe through their Solve and Coagula— the decomposition and re-composition of matter. Poe, the “Eureka” author also yearned for this reunion between hard science and ethereal spirit, and like Graff, recognised the precision of scientific thinking, the need for empirical observation, research and trial and error, but at the same time acknowledged the spirit and the light of consciousness. They both seem nostalgic for a time when the art of Alchemy was not reduced to chemistry and when the establishment did not label visionaries as heretics or decree that mysticism and science should follow separate paths.

Poe, just like Graff, was critical of the scientific dogmas of his time and sceptical of his contemporaries that were blinded by the science of their day and whose credulity now echoes our own. “Hoax is precisely the word suited to Mr Valdermar’s case (…) Some few persons believe it but I do not. The story is a pure fiction from beginning to end,” he said. He also added after having published two of his novels in scientific magazines, “The Swedenborgians inform me that they have discovered all that I said in a magazine article to be absolutely true, although at first they were very strongly inclined to doubt my veracity—a thing which, in that particular instance, I never dreamed of not doubting myself”.

If Graff aims to highlight the similarities between scientists and artists in their working processes it is because he too senses spirit and matter are one and the same. Creating for him consist of transforming one into the other. Incarnating Professore’s spirit into photographic images is an alchemical act of transformation. Graff describes the Bromoil technique that he sometimes employs as where a picture firstly made in silver gelatin undergoes a complete transformation from base metal to pigmented image. His explorative approach in the darkroom has led him to come up with self-invented practices such as the “Graffite” print (patent pending). This invention allows him to further investigate the mind of a scientist but also to imprint onto the viewer, at least on a subconscious level, the notion that Professore himself may actually stumble upon some tremendous new discovery.
 
What is certain is that he seems to have been paving the road for the latest findings of leading edge neuroscience, which is rediscovering the connection that exists between the soul and the brain. In the language of neuroscience the soul is the feminine life force animating our cells. It is the female subject in Professore’s lab, whose face is reflected in the glass jar—neuroscientist call her “Mitochondria”. The mitochondria are the energy factories at work within our cells, impacting our moods, vitality and aging process. They are inherited only from the feminine, our mother’s lineage. These mitochondria seem to be breaking down under the continual barrage of stress coming from our toxic emotions and environment. Just as Professore is looking into the brain of his muse in What’s the grey matter? cutting-edge neuroscience is looking into possibly reversing the damage caused by free radicals in the brain. When the muse, our inspiration, our optimal mitochondria is restored, then our genes will be able to generate cells that promote brain health. Our current brain wiring is as obsolete as Professore’s wiring in Unnatural ways to feel good about yourself. It relies on neural networks created by the prehistoric, survival at all cost, brain regions. Our toxic emotions and environment comes from this “old wiring” and in this regard, Professore seems to encourage us not to be afraid to adopt a new brain “wiring”, like in Moral animal. Neuroscience now affirms that we can grow new brain cells and change the actual networks in the brain. We can engage newer, higher, more evolved brain structures in the neo and prefrontal cortex.

It would be foolish to overlook Professore’s heroic efforts to communicate this precious information to us. Fortunately for him, the relationship of spirit and matter, while subjugated to the background, was never totally erased from human consciousness. Neuroscience now states that enlightenment is the condition of optimal mitochondria and brain functioning and this implies that Professore was indeed onto something!
 If this is the case, it would indeed be very wise for him to stay “under the radar” and carry on hiding behind the self-depreciating mask of an odd and eccentric scientist, since our scientific community, caught up in its technocracy, bureaucracy and interest groups, has sometimes been merciless towards true visionaries and inventors.
Just as Edgar Allan Poe’s writing attempted to demystify death as a mere transformation from caterpillar to butterfly, Graff, through his alter-ego, is directly tapping into the mysteries of the universe that are within the scope of human consciousness to resolve.
 
TEXT BY FLORENCE LOBET  
© picture Stephane Graff, Unnatural Ways to Feel Good About Yourself

Jürgen Klauke

Darkness in a blue void.
Front centre a large wooden table.
On the table a disconnected bathtub.
Suspended in midair over the bathtub a MAN.
Greying hair. Earring. Black suit. Leather boots.
MAN levitates parallel to bathtub.
He looks down into the bathtub.

What sounds like stage directions by Beckett is the description of a six-by-eight foot photograph by the artist Jürgen Klauke, “Erstarrtes Ich” (Frozen Self). Klauke’s photography immediately attracts associations unrelated to photography. His photographic oeuvre is a kind of composite artwork and it conveys many of his other art practices in a different form. In that sense, it “translates” his three decades of paintings, drawings, performances, happenings, videos, book publications, and “scribbles” into provocative studies of gender, sexuality, eroticism, and the boundaries of the mind. It also translates Klauke’s aversion to middle-class morality. The artist, presently a professor at the School of Media in Cologne, Germany, admits to growing up “in a bigoted Catholic household in Cologne” and realizing early on in his career that a “social middle class sense of morality has no place in the art world.”

       Via Klauke’s command of several media, we enter his photographic works as though entering a theatre of mental images where the plays are rituals with a muted affinity to language, art, philosophy, and underground music. Among the frequently used stage-props we find the table, the chair, the cane, the balloon filled with water, the tower of derbies, and the bucket. The photographed object, the human subject, and the title of the photograph build a unity in these productions. All three serve as indispensable performers.
      
Jürgen Klauke’s photography has already covered a lot of ground: from his black-and-white clown shows of the “Greetings from the Vatican series” – starring the artist as an archbishop wearing a see-through bra and garter belts under his vestments – to his multiple personality self-portraits; from his “self performances” with masks, make-up, the antlers of a stag, transsexual posing, and “red leather” bondage costumes with hints of vintage David Bowie (“Masculin-Feminin” and “Transformer”) to his photographs practically Dogma-like political film sequences; and from his abstract photo-sequences reminiscent of Hans Richter’s surreal film “Dreams Money Can Buy” to his enduring trademark in recent self-portraits – his businessman-magician or man-in-black look.

In these works the presence of the human body (often Klauke’s body) consistently points to ways of conceptualizing the body. Some of the photographs suggest “philosophical” mug shots that document how suspects transform, pause, and contemplate, and not merely how they look after the alleged crime of being; some suggest abstract human remnants in a work of “Concrete” photography, and others a human body charged with the kind of sexual longing and sexual ambivalence siphoned from archetypes of Pop and Rock culture.

In Klauke’s later works, however, like in “Frozen Self” and the other “monumental” blue or red-toned images, the human body is reduced to a naked or clothed piece of inventory and becomes more like an “art object” – or more like a living shrine. Among these photographs we also find images where no human subjects at all appear and the object world dominates, or images where the human subject has sombre or hilarious encounters with shelving units, tables, or chairs. In every case, though, the photograph evokes a wrestling match between the human body and “existence” – or as Klauke says: “The grotesque temporality of existence”. Under closer inspection the photographs reveal states of mind caused by questioning the moral and psychological fibre of Western society, which allows them to function at the same time as reflections and attacks on bourgeois longing, living, and loving. They interrupt the accepted patterns used to convey beauty and take special aim at the viewer’s nervous system. Their aesthetic brilliance is simple: we experience visual and conceptual Spartanism as a form of excess, and while the photographs document embodiments of longing, living, and loving, they distance themselves from any “traditional” photographic documentation of such human capacities.

Klauke’s imagery operates strongest at three crossover points: where description becomes invention, where the masculine becomes the feminine, and where photography struggles to remain photography, since his works advocate a distinction between “photography,” used to document the outside world, and “art photography,” Klauke’s preferred photography, used to document an inner expression of freedom. Behind all this stands the unmistakable humour of a sceptical optimist who produces carefully staged “dark comedies” on the banalities of life. This too, somehow refers to the opening association. In Beckett’s “Endgame”, the old woman who lives in the trashcan tells us: “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness”.
     
In 1994 and 2005, Jürgen Klauke and Cindy Sherman were exhibited together. In 1994, they shared the exhibition spaces of the Goetz Collection in Munich. Apart from being an exciting “two-part” solo, the exhibition was an intriguing comparative study of two photographers with compelling similarities. Both artists are masters of the photographic self-portrait. Both treat life as a theatre, film, or circus; and both investigate the relationship between human beings and photography. But while Sherman ultimately “turns her attention to fashion, food, myths, war, and art history,” Klauke – via “male fantasies” made intoxicatingly narcissistic and voyeuristic in the photo-making process – ultimately concentrates on a mental dialog between the body and the world of objects.

Sherman and Klauke both portray themselves as androgynous creatures in a netherworld between life and art, but one major difference is their unalike inner-calling. As a child of the enlightened 60s, representative of a generation of artists such as Vito Acconci, Duane Micheals, Klaus Rinke, and others who pioneered Body Art, Klauke’s art seems to insist on paying tribute to that other era. Put differently, his art seems more driven than Sherman’s art by the doctrines of an art generation that secured photography’s acceptance as an art form in the first place. Hence the different and not always so different reception of the two artists. A journalist once called Klauke’s art “Un-German” (Sherman’s art is surely “Un-American”), and Meret Oppenheim referred to it as “a little beautiful and a little dirty at the same time”.  

Oppenheim’s reference could probably apply to the photo-sequence “Viva España”. In its individual “stills,” the faces of the two performers (man and woman) remain cloaked by their black garments. HE holds HER elevated in a variety of acrobatic positions, and, while her legs – revealing high-heeled shoes and garter belts – hang over his shoulders or rise up like antennae, project from under his arms or bend in midair at the knees, they perform a “dance” that seems to involve sex in a standing position. In the last still, with the woman upside-down now, they come to rest on a chair, united in a pose resembling the body of an insect. This photographic performance – one of the artist’s earlier demonstrations of how life and art merge – seems dominated by dirty dancing.

But in Klauke’s recent photographs the mental issues dominate. Patient and at peace with themselves, the artist and his human subjects appear in monumental picture frames, and, with their own bodies, they conduct what appear to be studies on loneliness, gravity, death, and run-of-the-mill boredom. The colour, stillness, and symmetry of these images only seem to have a high-profile portraiture quality. In reality, what passes for a visual aesthetic is actually a mental one, and the compositional simplicity nearly blinds us to the reference being made to a “transfigured soul becoming a transformed soul”. The visual or spiritual fixation of these images refers more so to “states of mind” like desire and hope, and to boredom – a state to which Klauke owes a great deal.

In his photo-series “The Formalizing of Boredom” – completed after “suffering an artistic lull and unbearable sense of repetition in life” – he chose to give a form to what was threatening to undo him then. At the core of this body of works on the complexity and lunacy of boredom – featuring Klauke with a plastic bucket covering his face, the bucket signifying the world “kicking the bucket” – is the realization that boredom is a unique mental state “part motionless, part unfilled periods of time,” and part insidious game played with the senses. It arises from an exaggerated moment of inactivity; it transforms its victim when emotional, social, and psychological factors such as love, work, and belief fail to operate properly. But most importantly, boredom not only tells us something is wrong; it tells us something really exists.

The “visualized” state of boredom in Klauke’s works causes a transformation of the identity that recalls Rimbaud’s famous remark: “Je’est un autre” (I is another). At times it also camouflages the identity of the photograph. Like with the huge blue or red images, and the works compiled in 2000 for the artist’s book, “Trost für Arschlöcher oder Desaströses Ich” (Consolation for Assholes or The Disastrous Self ), what appears to be a denouncement of life or happiness is only Klauke’s photography running its usual course and functioning as both an information carrier and information transformer.

From the late 1990s to the present, Klauke’s monumental blue and red-toned photographs express his artistic concerns on a grander and almost classical scale. In spite of their “empty” appearance, none of his artistic trademarks are missing – whether the poetic reference, the meaning-laden choice of title, and (Rock) musicality in the photograph’s blurred sections, or the “Absurd Theatre” gestures of the human subjects and the staged moments of nudity. Viewed individually or in groups, they create a perfectly balanced Theatre of the Self. They refer as much to sculpture and dance as they do to “art photography,” and their use of “photographed” time, space, and signs illuminates the humane-erotic adventure at the root of Klauke’s works: the journeys forged by thought-provoking mind games that revel in the “condition humaine”.  

“Before staging a photograph, a good deal is imagined and figured out in advance,” says Klauke. But this hardly simplifies things. The selection and placement of the used objects are of paramount importance: “The way an object is used decides whether the work speaks of freedom or restraint.” Much of the selection process is handled beforehand in texts and later transposed into images. But, while making the actual photographs, “the objects and the human subjects have to be drastically reduced and yet leave room for sensuality and poetry”. And searching for any supportive visual material along the way only generates the problem with the visible and the invisible: “What I need and prefer are my own images. I need what isn’t there more than I do what is [...] I work my way down through the crust of an idea, bit by bit, mistake by mistake, toward the true sense of an idea.” Which echoes another of Beckett’s ironic sayings: “Try, fail, try again, fail better.”

When an artwork is about life, what could be more difficult than capturing the exact sense? Here Klauke’s philosophical bent comes to his rescue: “I don’t necessarily pursue any greater sense. On the contrary, I formulate the totally senseless, and, in turn, that’s what gives me a sense – for a while”. What helps convey this sense is his carefully contrived system of codes, composed of constellations of objects. For example: Table = World, Bucket = Eliminated World, Table + 3 Hanging Buckets = Stillness, etc…

So it happens that when the curtain rises, that is, when our gaze rises to one of the blue or red-toned photographs, we see what resembles a staged construction on the one hand, and the last traces of a happening or just-documented event on the other. In this setup, the atmospheric density of the blue or red void seems to suggest music. Our eyes can almost “hear” it – a kind of soundtrack in these oddly mythological images intensified by titles like “Annäherungsakrobatik” (The Acrobatics of Coming Closer), “Warteschleife”  (Holding Pattern), “Zweisamkeitsimaginierung” (Illusions of Togetherness), “Dritter Wiener Richtung” (The Third Viennese School), “Entrückungserlebnis” (Feeling Enraptured) and “Phantomempfindung” (A Phantom Sensation). Regarding the titles, what the artist does compares to naming the entirety of one poem with the entirety of another. What astounds us the most is the vastness of the photograph’s used and unused space, and watching a framed two-dimensionality masquerade as a three-dimensional performance.
 
On a visual level, Klauke’s early experiments with X-ray photography also seem present here, at least where “the external appearance of objects and human subjects dissolve, lose a portion of their meaning, become de-individualized, and transform into something else, into something entirely new”. While encountering this “something entirely new” in a piece of straightforward photography like “The Acrobatics of Coming Closer”, we have the impression that we see right through what looks back at us. Yet the surface and content of other images remain as locked away from us as a stranger’s thoughts. And so the MAN who carries out the perplexing experiment with the rectangular shield harpooned with canes wins our attention without us ever learning what it is he discovers right before our eyes. Or we have pictorial variations like the one in “Phantom Sensation”, where sharply focussed or blurred objects – in this case, a stack of derbies – levitate, tumble, and fly out of the frame of their own will.  

What these coded mental-scenarios or fragments of dream-happenings would never have us forget is that the artist is aware of the world’s violence and cynicism, and of the mediocrity of life. They want to tell us that his goal is not to create art for art’s sake, with his back turned to the world’s shortcomings. On the contrary, Klauke’s goal is to look directly at life, at the “grotesque temporality of existence,” and to visualize it as best he can from both sides – from the world’s morbid standpoint and from his own memories, sensations, and experiences.

In March 2005, a selection of Jürgen Klauke’s works made an appearance at the DFOTO International Photography Fair in Sans Sebastian, in Northern Spain. And no other word but “appearance” applies. His blue-toned photographs appeared in the exhibition space in the same manner that spirits, angels or visions might appear. From one moment to the next. Maybe there, maybe not. Represented at DFOTO by the Paris-based Gallery Cent 8, Klauke’s photographic “mind games” not only overpowered the space; they seemed to bring all the movement around them to a standstill. It was as though they were repeating the title of the recent publication on Klauke’s complete photographic works, “Absolute Windstille,” which refers to that moment when the wind comes to a halt and imitates the stillness of an object.

TEXT BY KARL EDWARD JOHNSON 
©picture Jurgen Klauke

Germán Peraire

Night Diary is the photographic chronicle of the nocturnal wanderings of Spainsh photographer, Germán Peraire. They are impressions captured by a man astray in the night, wandering through nameless bars and town squares surveying an uncertain metropolis as he encounters a cacophony of clatter and hum, echoing from this subterranean urban nightscape. Employing a simple, but raw pallet of high key black and white tones, Germán collects shadows and intimacies punctuated with hints of gender blur and irreverence.

The images in Night Diary unravel as a series of scenarios, like a collection of one act plays, each with its own distinct narrative. The photographs reverberate with pathos and pain, laughter, love, and desolation. Some moments vibrate with the vapours of alcohol, others rattle with a distinct surrealism from an in-between world. A world where conventional boundaries of sexuality and sensuality blur. Madness tumbles forth in ways one can only stumble upon when on walkabout in the early morning hours before night lifts and is replaced by the harshness of dawn. In the blazing morning light, these impressions are obliterated immediately like a vampire burned by the sun, but when encountered in the intensity of night, spotlit under garish streetlights, the shadows that fall become epic and the subjects hold centre stage with bold defiance.

Night Diary also pays homage to what the artist describes as, the Spanish way of encountering the night – “people are drawn together with no determined final destination, but with a desire to be immersed in the energy of the moment present.” Enacted on a stage of narrow streets in the old town of Barcelona, Germán seeks other “night wolves” like himself, who grapple with personal phantoms, and like him, contemplate their existence while wandering aimlessly. He searches within this sea of outsiders for kinship, even if only for a brief few moments. Amid the messy, unkempt implied decadence, Germán seeks to discover and record with his camera a purity, a secret beauty within, lying underneath the crust of this frenetic night force that holds him spellbound.

The streets are a playground for his subjects where they act out expressionistic tales and he watches, as if from the window of a train—distant, an outsider, among outsiders. His resulting impressions reveal a deep loneliness, a fathomless, creatural hunger based on an instinctual need to belong somewhere with someone, even if only a few desperate moments. He intimately records the energy exchanged between himself and his subjects, almost as if he has been able to find a way to crawl under their skins and feel their existence first hand. They stare out from his images with an openness and affinity that leaves the viewer curious as to the relationship between artist and subject.

With the eyes of a street poet, Germán employs chiaroscuro as his spoken vocabulary, to release the sound of the crowd—the resonance of their raw emotion pours forth from their gaze. There is a strong sense of respect for these night wanderers in their quests resonating from each image, whether their journey seems to be but a brief moment of experimentation and philosophical exploration, or if the streets take the form of a prison with no escape—a permanent residence not of choice, but of inevitability. This candid honesty which is ever-present throughout Germán’s images in Night Diary, expresses no sentimentality, only this incredible sense of an implied collaboration between artist and subject, like an ephemeral bridge of understanding, constructed in a fleeting moment.

Germán describes Night Diary as the first major opus in his photographic career. He feels at present it is but a sonata, the tip of an iceberg that he will continue to develop into a full-blown symphony over time. His aim is to portray “a hedonist, marginalised humanity seeking pleasures,” but he also catches in his photographic net the other souls, those who get disoriented and lost in the night and can find no escape. The images are the reflection of his personal universe that he finds scattered around him in these night explorations. Throughout the work is a sense of homesickness, restlessness and homelessness, comprised into an unforgettable cantos, affirming this endless search for essence, identity and belonging by humanity. The visual tune is powerful, pounding with a steady bass rhythm of a perhaps tattered, but indomitable hope.

TEXT BY PEGGY SUE AMISON
©Picture: German Peraire
Represented by Galeria Togomago, Barcelona

Robert Mapplethorpe

An interview with Sofia Coppola

Filmmaker Sofia Coppola has a status as impressive as hard to believe. In the United States she ranks as the first lady of “Best Director” Oscar nominations: the first American woman ever nominated for an Academy Award for directing, an honour received for her 2003 film Lost in Translation, two more feature films, and a Golden Lion honorary award (conferred upon her at the 2010 Venice Film Festival for Somewhere) – Coppola’s talents are surpassing the art of moviemaking. Now she celebrates her skills as a curator as well.

From Mapplethorpe’s visually-exacting sexual explorations to his faultless floral studies (vaguely reminiscent of the Japanese aesthetic which passes through Lost in Translation), Coppola clearly reacts in her own way to selected lesser-known images by the controversial photographer who died of AIDS in 1989. She presents viewers with a body of work that evokes a vision less influenced by the undertow of what Mapplethorpe once labelled “smut raised to art”. In fact, by comparison, Coppola’s personal selection—extracted from around the potentially shocking and frighteningly beautiful photographic offerings (coined by Peter Conrad of The Observer “florid penises and penile flowers”)—presents an entirely different line of thought.

Coppola does not rediscover Robert Mapplethorpe. Instead, as implied by her new profession, she truly “selects” from him. Almost joyously, she rethinks Mapplethorpe, the “stylish Manhattan fetish-hipster”, as the multifaceted phenomenon he really was. Finally, her present-day look at Mapplethorpe is achieved by putting a face of her own design on the master’s images. At times her selection also evinces a group effort made possible with the help of former co-workers and friends of the artist such as Dimitri Levas, a man who began as Mapplethorpe’s image scout and prop supplier. However, one wonders—personal contact being supremely important to Mapplethorpe in his lifetime—had reality, time, and coincidence allowed Sofia Coppola and Robert Mapplethorpe to connect, would it have been possible for curator and photographer to find some artistic niche to creatively bond in? At the same time would it have been possible for Coppola’s winning and socially-astute “cinematic” humour to somehow alter Mapplethorpe’s pretended lack of one: his famously dark and sexually-charged inner grin, a mask of sorts which strangely covers his semi-Warholian aura, and his well-publicised, deathly serious gaze which shines brightest from behind his black-and-white images of nudes and flowers?

In any event, regarding Coppola’s debut, a suitable second title for the show would be The Curator’s Cut. What goes unnoticed at first is the fine line separating direction from selection, the all-uniting choice-making that casts and directs images by making, for example, hypothetical “love scenes” precede or follow hypothetical “fight scenes”. Imaginary or not, no overall visual script for the still images—dictating how photographs lead up to or away from each other—is actually visible here. In its place, viewers receive a gallery-savvy selection more design than cinematic storytelling. Yet the excitement of a film is present in other ways, and we do sense the likes of flat actors on the “screen” of the gallery wall.  

Experienced film-buffs might read into Coppola’s image selection the kind of saccharine acridity that recalls the opening scenes of her film The Virgin Suicides. But the message is not, after all, the medium in this case. Ultimately, what on the surface of the selected photographs appears refined and tranquil—if also slightly scented with a passing knowledge of death and raised to newer levels of visual rapture through undeniably beautiful images of children, animals, and flowers—evidences one of Mapplethorpe’s most developed callings: his ability to infuse any object or person with a sense of classicism—from a shiny dead fish left on a newspaper to remarkably endowed men and women often the consenting victims of bondage spectacles, intermingled with what often appears in Coppola’s French show: the cherub-like child and innocuously “penile” exotic flower.

With an artist of Mapplethorpe’s calibre it seems difficult, if not ludicrous, to say whether his images are properly received or appreciated at this stage of the art-history game. All things considered, ferocious scandals and censorship issues of the type which plagued the travelling show The Perfect Moment have been (largely) relegated to the past. At heart, what Robert Mapplethorpe’s art represents is the love of and fascination with what one sees. His gaze is so real, so close to existence itself, and so much of his viewers’ own flesh and blood that any criticism instantly falls short of its intended purpose. Why should it not? One could just as easily be finding fault with the clouds racing by overhead or, for that matter, with the laws of gravity. On several counts, Mapplethorpe’s imagery is that natural, that essential.

Faced with such simple complexities (or overly-simple realities) it might be best to do what Coppola—the curator—does. She exhibits an unswerving belief in her own visions, feelings, and tastes, and, as if an artistic creature made of living-and-thinking glass, she effortlessly reflects another person’s view of life on the surface of her own. There is as much distance-making as private exploration at work. Also, there is a different and totally legitimate “approach” to art appreciation: enjoyment. If nothing else, Sofia Coppola’s curatorial debut emphasizes a refreshing truth about her subject. For appearing void of humour, Robert Mapplethorpe’s all-seeing and surely all-sensing gaze consistently dares viewers not to be amused.                    

Karl Johnson: Is this the first time you have worked as a curator? What was your initial reaction to the invitation to curate a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition—or did you choose this particular artist yourself?  

Sofia Coppola: Thaddaeus Ropac asked me if I would curate the show, and I thought it would be interesting to look through Mapplethorpe’s archive. I’ve never done this before. But I knew, of course, that the gallery had different artists curate shows of Mapplethorpe’s work in the past.

KJ: As a filmmaker you most likely have a strong interest in still photography. Do you collect photography and perhaps developed knowledge of Mapplethorpe’s work in that way?

SC: Yes, I do collect. I started collecting photography when I was a teenager. My mom took me to art fairs and she would give me photos for Christmas. I love photography, and it taught me a lot that I used later when making films. For my first film, Virgin Suicides, I looked at Bill Owens and Joseph Zsabo, as well as at 1970s Playboy photography.

KJ: Mapplethorpe photographed many artists and personalities he knew personally. When Cindy Sherman curated the 2003 Eye to Eye show it was one friend reconsidering the work of another. With an artist like Mapplethorpe, the personal side always played a major role. How did you go about getting to know him, so to speak, before you curated the show?

SC: I looked through his photos with Dimitri, who was a friend of Mapplethorpe’s as well as his art director, and it was great to hear all the stories behind the photos. And he pointed out things to me I didn’t know about, like Mapplethorpe’s portraits of children.

KJ: Of course the most important topic of discussion is your selection, the photographs you chose to exhibit and why. Can you describe your concept and selection?

SC: I just chose what appealed to me first. I enjoyed picking the Mapplethorpe images that are less known, the images I didn’t really know about myself until now, like the photographs of children and horses.

KJ: Without calling Mapplethorpe a tragic or socially-remote figure, the final stages of his life somehow imply the deconstruction of a character formerly in the limelight. Do you see it this way, too—and perhaps as a situation reminiscent of Johnny Marco’s in your film Somewhere?
 
SC: No, I don’t think of Mapplethorpe in that way.

KJ: What struck so many people as scandalous about Mapplethorpe’s work in, say, the 1970s to 1990s, hardly disturbs the way that it did before. For one thing, we can discuss sexuality and pornographic intensity with more openness today. How important is the controversial “edge” of Mapplethorpe’s art for you as a curator? Do you think it still shocks?

SC: Yes, there are some images that are really hard to look even now. But I didn’t focus on those in the show. I wanted to look at another side of his work.

KJ: I find the idea of you directing your vision at Mapplethorpe’s work refreshing. Many major photographers have been handled so predictably in the art world, and a totally new outlook like yours can lead to genuine rediscoveries. Do you or your colleagues think that your work with Mapplethorpe’s art presents a new take on his material and meaning?

SC: I hope so. For the show I picked images I connected with. And when I saw books by other people who curated Mapplethorpe shows, it was interesting to see how his work has been handled from so many different angles.

KJ: Mapplethorpe’s art also offers a wide range of exceptional portraits of woman. Experts like Arthur C. Danto have mentioned them in connection with the exciting but unalike portraits of women by Garry Winogrand in Women Are Beautiful, a series that Mapplethorpe commented on. Do you give special attention to Mapplethorpe’s treatment of women in the exhibition?

SC: I didn’t really focus on that at all. But I have, of course, included some women. I really just chose the images that I liked, and that I thought could work together for a show. And, like I said already, I enjoyed most discovering the images that I didn’t know.

KJ: Now that you’ve had, so to speak, the curator’s experience, would you consider such work a special challenge for a film director—or are both activities somehow similar for you? What also comes to mind here is watching, for example, film director William Friedkin work as an opera director nowadays. Do you find it exciting to work outside your usual professional environment?

SC: I find anything you do creatively to be quite similar. For example, while I’m directing, I’m also editing, making decisions based on what I like—or else using my instincts. It was a great deal of fun for me to learn more about Mapplethorpe and, of course, to have access to his archives. And yes, I do enjoy doing things that I’ve never done before. That’s why I’m really looking forward to hanging the show. The truth is, I’ve always wanted to be an art director.

TEXT BY KARL E. JOHNSON
©picture: Robert Mapplethorpe, Katherine Cebrian, 1980
Courtesy, Thaddaeus Ropac

Anders Petersen

Intensive and sensitive

The Swedish photographer Anders Petersen has won many prizes, among them Photographer of the Year at the 2003 Arles Festival. He exhibits internationally, is collected by numerous prestigious institutions and has had over twenty books published, all while working freelance, and not for newspapers or even advertising.

He had made a name for himself by the time Café Lehmitz was published, titled after an ordinary bar in Hamburg’s St. Pauli quarter frequented by drinkers, whores, petty criminals and ordinary people in the 1960s. Back then, as a grammar school dropout, Petersen used to frequent Hamburg, photographing the dark side of the entertainment industry with all its failed lives. And his fascination for this basic subject matter remained. But his attitude has no hint of voyeurism, on the contrary: as the photographer himself puts it, the Hamburg bar was for him a symbol of warmth and human contact where true friendships were made and kept. It is evident from his pictures that he felt himself among kindred spirits and quickly became integrated into this scene.

Café Lehmitz appeared in print ten years later. It was his third book, and one of the first publications with the Munich-based publishing house Schirmer/Mosel, that thereafter made a name for itself in part with author photography. The publication secured Petersen’s reputation abroad as well and has since been reprinted in Germany. Tom Waits used one of the images for the cover of his 1985 “Rain Dogs” album and thus sealed the iconic significance of Petersen’s photography. For some years now, Petersen has been rediscovered outside Sweden too—assisted in this by being awarded the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize by the German Society of Photography (Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Photographie) in 2008. His images have now attained classic status. There are bound to be more prizes and retrospectives to follow.
 
Since his first publication Gröna Lund in 1973, he has produced numerous artist’s books and catalogues, not all for the international book market but usually for the Swedish one. His most recent, three-volume Steidl publication City Diary is about to go to press.  

1995 saw the publication of his book Ingen har sett allt—and thus we come to his first exhibition at the Swedish Photography Gallery in Berlin. Nobody has seen everything, which is the English title, was then the title of his book of 47 black-and-white images that had been created in several psychiatric institutions around Stockholm between 1992 and 1995. The exhibition of some 40 small-format vintage prints, which Swedish Photography is exhibiting for the first time, as a series entitled Mental Hospital, offers an almost complete overview of the sequence and the artistic intention behind it. In the case of the missing images, particularly ones with sexual content, Petersen was not able to secure the consent of the patients’ next-of-kin.

In the 1960s, anyone could visit Café Lehmitz, but it was unlikely that they could take photos freely. The challenge was surely harder still in the psychiatric institutions of the 1990s: a photographer would first have to win the trust of doctors, attendants and, above all, the patients, whose stay might be temporary or compulsory. In this society too, Petersen conducted himself with sensitivity and assurance and his camera seemed to become forgotten by the subjects during the long-term project. The sequence occasionally shows direct eye contact with a patient and thus a connection is established, even if the result is usually a strangely inward gaze. Be that as it may we, too, are drawn as later observers into an unknown world, a closed system. On viewing these intense portraits we can’t resist their pull.

The high-contrast black-and-white quality of the images makes these classic, timeless documents a hallmark of the photographer. His pictures are still taken with an analogue, 35 mm or 6 x 6 format camera, always in black and white, and bear no individual titles, as they are parts of a series. Photo historians like to pigeonhole Petersen as a social documentary photographer. But the term documentary is certainly problematic in this case. We can say that Petersen eschews on principle the manipulation of his images, but they are very subjective which, of course, rules out objectivity. And as objectivity seems to be an important criterion for a documentary eye, we had better be wary of such pigeonholes. Petersen himself once said of his intention that what interesting to him was “…the bare encounter, the naked, powerful confrontation with the other, and hence with ourselves.” Seen in this way, his portraits could be understood as an extended self-portrait.

The photographer has placed most patients at the Swedish clinics in front of a neutral background where hardly anything distracts from the individual. However, in one picture, in contrast, numerous dark marks can be seen on a white table, likely caused by lit cigarettes left on the tabletop. This inattentiveness is reflected in the man’s unselfconscious pose, as he lies fully-dressed on a bed; he seems to have slipped away from normal life. The tabletop is presumably plastic, designed, as the rest of the bare tiled room, for pragmatic, everyday functionality. Here, Petersen has chosen a view from above and shows a claustrophobic, stage-like situation, whereas in other images the view is from below, photographed from the grass roots, as it were. His images are always perfectly composed, often incorporating unusual traces of light; these arise from “a gut feeling”, as the photographer says, a combination of intuition and years of artistic experience.

Petersen combines distance and proximity to the object in an inimitable pictorial language. He always seems to be right in the thick of things, allowing himself to be engrossed by the situation—just like his earlier colleagues Ed van der Elsken or Bruce Davidson, and later Daido Moriyama or Nan Goldin. Yet in spite of the unusual proximity to the subject matter of the images, in this case to people, Petersen manages to preserve a distance, enabling him to produce portraits which are restrained, unadorned, individual and simultaneously typecast, whether in everyday situations or in closed institutions. Beauty and terror are often found side by side.
Petersen feels an emotional connection to his fellow humans: we can sense his empathy. He approaches them with respect, curiosity and an open mind—and creates pictures, which move us without leaving us too shocked. It is almost an affectionate approach: the people in bars, prisons or mental hospitals are by no means compromised. He allows the inmates of the psychiatric clinics sufficient space for themselves, their self-expression and their surroundings, which they have in part chosen. There is hardly anyone who makes a sad or desperate impression; most appear simply absent, self-absorbed. Thus any charge of voyeurism in his photography rebounds. But at the same time, the idea emerges of an intensive, uncompromising investigation into the depths of human existence, which is surely revealed in these places.

Born in 1944 in Stockholm, Petersen now lives there once more. From 1966 to 1968, he studied with Christer Strömholm at the photography college that the latter founded in Stockholm. Petersen has worked since 1970 as a freelance photographer, initially also for Swedish newspapers and magazines. In 1973, he studied for two years at the College of Film and TV. In workshops nowadays, he advises young photography students to try and forget everything they have ever learnt—or simply switch their thoughts off when photographing. This might be a useful key for us also when considering his enigmatic work.

TEXT BY MATTHIAS HARDER
©picture Anders Petersen
Courtesy, Swedish Photography, Berlin

Rolph Gobits

Vaudeville

Meeting Rolph Gobits was a bit like discovering a lost treasure. Although he has an international reputation for his travel photography, landscapes, and advertising work, his photographs of travelling entertainers have yet to be exhibited. I was allowed a peek at a selection of extraordinary images of mainly black-and-white prints of former dancers, tightrope walkers, lasso artists, and ventriloquists. In many cases, the performers seemed to know the perfect pose and seemed to relish the opportunity to captivate a new, albeit invisible audience.

Despite the proud poses, Gobits’ images are often quite melancholic and wistful. Gobit thought that this was probably because most of these accomplished stage performers no longer earning their livings as performers, having been made redundant by television, which gradually began to appear in British homes in the 1950s. Gobits began to realise that no one wanted to go to the Hippodrome to see live vaudeville anymore, so, in 1971 he became interested in photographing these remarkable people. “I went to a children’s party and my friends had booked a vaudeville entertainer. I started to talk to him — it might have been Verdini [SW: who projects duck-shaped hand shadows on the wall]”. Since that time, Gobits has spent over 30 years photographing these nearly forgotten performers.

As a child Gobits used to go to the Tuschinski, Amsterdam’s wonderful art deco movie theatre. Before the main feature, a live performer would come out on stage to entertain the audience by walking the trapeze, do some card tricks or some fancy juggling. These magical encounters had a huge impact on Gobits and he became fascinated with photography at an early age.
 “I bought my first camera”, he remembers, “when I was nine – a Yashica”. With his new acquisition, he would go off to nearby Schiphol airport to find out whether his camera was really capable of capturing an image at 1000th of a second by trying to freeze the spinning propeller blades of an aeroplane. I wondered whether his parents encouraged his interest in photography. He noted that they weren’t particularly artistic but they didn’t discourage his enthusiasm for photography either. In any case, they were much more preoccupied with other things, such as working for the Dutch Underground during the Second World War.
It was only after he moved to Britain to study at the Royal College of Arts in London, Gobits pointed out, that he really “learnt how to look”. After he graduated he worked for Nova magazine and worked on many commercial assignments but always ended up returning to photographing the travelling entertainers.

Many of his subjects were (and remain) very poor, but Gobits didn’t mind the shabby Wilton carpets and the cramped bed sitting rooms of these elderly performers. He has always preferred to photograph his Vaudeville performers in their homes or somewhere nearby. The only exception being the image shot inside a small circus tent which a performer had made from striped canvas windbreaks stolen from a local beach. It seems that this performer had his heart set on establishing his own two-man circus but couldn’t afford to buy any cloth.
On the whole, however, Gobits enjoys “taking people out of their usual context”, by which he means a theatrical setting. He initially found it difficult to invite himself into people’s homes, especially some of the older women who lived alone. He relied on word-of-mouth to gain access to these forgotten stars and even managed to photograph The Vernon Sisters who lived in Potters Bar. This enigmatic shot features them wearing voluminous frilly cancan skirts which they lift up, revealing their lacy knickers. He’s not sure they’re still alive but Gobits feels that he’s capturing a disappearing world or what he describes as “a forgotten tribe”.

His collection of portraits include some very surreal scenes such as the photo of the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec impersonator, which has the air of a curious 19th- century relic. He is portrayed here kneeling down with his shoes tied to his knees to make him seem even smaller. Some of Gobits’ portraits are quite sad, such as the one of the clown holding onto a Zimmer frame next to his bed in a nursing home. Other evocative photos were taken in a caravan park. Here, through a window we see an elderly juggler spinning plates while watching his favourite soap opera. The conspicuous absence of an audience is what makes these shots particularly poignant and affecting.
“Obviously it’s the oldest people I want to get first”, Gobits emphasises. He is determined to meet these talented people before they quietly pass away. But it should be emphasised that not everyone in these photographs is in their seventies and eighties. One particularly striking image is the one of an escape artist tied up on her living room floor. This young woman is being studiously ignored by the man in a cardigan sitting in the corner who he seems more interested in the television than in watching her escape. The incongruity of a bound woman in a suburban semitrailer gives this photograph a mischievous and engaging air. Gobits doesn’t mind teasing the viewer, and with some of his images you get the feeling you are actually watching a live performance. His approach is a combination of complex and simple, which mixes the theatrical with the everyday.

These images could be perceived as the (imaginary) result of what would happen if Angela Carter and Harold Pinter wrote a play together: with fantasy roles being played out in very ordinary spaces with no audience on hand to witness the extraordinary feats of these venerable performers. In Ropespinner, we notice that the woman in chains is gazing back at us, which gives us the feeling that Gobits has reversed our roles. We become self-conscious as viewers of people who are no longer being viewed and that we are partly at fault. This sense of loss is emphasised by the fact that many of his characters wear costumes that are endearingly and shabbily out of date. For instance, the elderly dancer, Terry Dougan, is dressed in ill-fitting tights and shoes, with no one left to applaud her.

Gobits’ photographs have the ability to capture an entire dramatic performance in one shot. For instance, take the photo of the woman striking the operatic pose as the Devil and Virgin, which is all the more astonishing because this double act is actually performed by woman in a virginal white evening dress holding a fiendish mask and black cloak. She has the tragic demeanour of Maria Callas, which suggests that Gobits manages to capture ancient myths still being acted out in mundane living rooms. He never ridicules or mocks these heroines, acrobats, and illusionists. Instead, he prefers to capture the last vestiges of this dying profession. These outstanding images make all the participants seem dignified despite their bedraggled costumes. Gobits honours everyone he photographs and it is rare to see contemporary images portray such extraordinary integrity and enchantment. Like a young child mesmerised by a conjuror at the circus, we want to ask; “how did he do that?”

Text by Siobhan Wall
©picture: Rolph Gobits

John Waters

John Waters, Baltimore’s “Pope of Trash” and the filmmaker behind cult classics like Hairspray and Pink Flamingos, makes more than movies. His contemporary art, a collection of montage photography, sculpture, and self-portraiture, is as bizarrely humorous and intelligent as his films. Rear Projection, his latest exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, is a bawdy feast of good-natured parody. In what follows, Waters explains how bad film stills make great art, why contemporary art hates people, and what it’s like to pose as the Provincetown Town Crier.

Clayton Maxwell: On the Gagosian website, you are quoted as saying, “There is no such thing as a bad movie frame. It can be a terrible movie but in the art world it can be seen in a totally different way.” Could you explain this?

John Waters: When you go to see a movie in the theatre you are thinking of the whole movie, the plot, and the performances throughout. If you are seeing it in the art world, as I am especially, and it doesn’t work in the movie world, you can take a still, which is basically 1/24th of a second, and think of it as a still to be printed. So you can look at whatever your want—the lamps or the rugs. Or take that image and edit it in with one from another movie and that turns the whole narrative around. And sometimes it’s the opposite of what it was saying in the original movie. I am really writing with these images what I notice in a movie. With two of the pieces in this series, The Penmark Collection and The Rope Collection, basically I am sneaking into a movie like an art thief, when none of the characters, the writer, the directors, the crew, when no one is looking, and taking the art off of the wall and taking it back to my home and then putting it into a gallery. That art has nothing to do with the plot. You are not supposed to notice it. No one talks about it. It is never featured for long on the screen. Therefore, to me it is the most important thing when I am watching the movie with an artistic eye.

CM: So it can be a pretty bad movie, but because you are free to do whatever you want with the stills, you can transform it.

JW: I love bad movies sometimes. Bad, what does that mean? Sometimes I think movies that win the Oscars are bad. Bad is an opinion. What I’m saying is, you can take any movie, one you love or hate, and subvert the original meaning of that movie by putting it up with another movie or putting it in a different order or editing out the details. Like a failed publicist for a movie who would be fired the first day—because the stills that I take are ones that would get no one to see the movie. They might get them to buy it and take it home from an art gallery. But that’s not what a publicist is supposed to do. And I am always convinced that nobody remembers movies, they remember the stills that made the movies famous.

So in that way I am trying to subvert all the insider knowledge about show business, but in a joyous way. Because I always make fun of things I love. I never parody the things I hate.

CM: Yes, and that’s what makes it more appealing to me as a viewer because it doesn’t come off as mean-spirited.

JW: No, it isn’t mean spirited, not at all. Even the Smile Train people called me. (Smile Train is the world’s largest cleft surgery charity.) I explained to them I parodied them because I love them. To me they are stars, too. Edith Massey could have been in the Smile Train. I could have switched stars.

CM: How did you come up with the Smile Train idea?

JW: Well, I get the ad in the mail everyday almost. And there are billboards of those children. They are as big as Jerry’s Kids ever were.

In the charity world there are stars, also. If I saw one of those children on the street I would recognise them I think because I’ve seen them so often. They are promoted. And I am not saying that’s wrong, I’m sure that charity does a great job. But at the same time, there are stars in every world and when I put them together I hope I am commenting that they are the same in a weird way.

CM: Yes, those Smile Train images really stick in your head.

JW: Yes, they do.  Like did you see the new woman today who got a new face and they showed this great improvement? It was staggering to me. They showed the before-and-after. Have you seen those pictures?

CM: No, I haven’t.

JW: Oh, look on-line. The woman who got a face-plant. You can never top what comes in the next day’s news.

CM: And I love how you do highlight that they, the Smile Train kids, are celebrities, too. It helps to rethink my ideas of celebrity.

JW: Every business has their celebrity. Every movement has to have a star, has to have somebody that sells it, that makes people be interested in it.

CM: One of my personal favourites in this series is the Town Crier. I read that it was an embarrassing experience for you.

JW: Let me tell you something. I live in Provincetown. Every summer there is a town crier. I remember they had one town crier who children ran from he was so scary. They’ve had a drunk, one who was a pervert…they’ve had a gay one. And the one they have now is lovely, and he’s good at it—he’s involved in the Broadway world, he’s an actor. And I see his joy every day in doing it. A long time ago I saw the scary town crier in the cleaner picking up his outfit and his regular clothes with the plastic over it and something made me crazy about that. So I was really thinking about what it would be like to be the town crier. So I just went over to the town crier’s house and asked him if I could borrow the outfit. It was so humiliating, but he was very lovely and very kind. The outfit is one size fits all, you’d be surprised, except for the tights I had to buy and I think the buckles on the shoes. And then for me, to do this in Provincetown, where generally I’m really well known because I’ve been there for so many years, but I’m always on my bicycle so no one can really stop me. By the time they say, “Hey, that’s John Waters” I’m already down the street… Well, to actually walk downtown at the height of the season and be dressed as the town crier was something really frightening for me to do. I got dressed in my apartment and looked in the mirror and said, “Am I actually going to walk out of the house like this?”

The real town crier wears the outfit with great authority and I wear it with great mortification. Because every day I’m dressed as John Waters and he’s dressed as the town crier, and in a weird way we have the same job because a lot of people know who I am and a lot of people know who he is. But maybe it would have been better if he had dressed as me at the same time. That’s what we should have done.

But I thought, “Well, I have to do it.” I have my art gallery in Provincetown, the Merola, and Jim, the part owner, picked me up in his van across the street. But I still had to walk across my yard and then I saw my landlady gardening, and she just looked up and the expression on her face— it said, “What in the hell could you possibly be doing?” It was a great moment because she was totally bewildered. That was the only person I made eye contact with when I had it on. So we went downtown. We had it all set up for the shoot. I jumped out of the van, took the shot then jumped back in. I couldn’t make eye contact with anyone in that outfit. It was a new exercise in humiliation for me; it was an S and M experience.

CM: That’s crazy that you should be so embarrassed. You are John Waters—aren’t you used to dressing up?

JW: But not as the town crier, though, not in a pilgrim outfit. I can dress like me everyday. But I can’t get dressed like the town crier. It’s just a different kind of drag. And I love the town crier. And he loves doing it. And he doesn’t look silly in it. But that’s a whole different thing. He wears it with confidence. I wore it like bondage.

CM: And is that a good experience?

JW: I did it once. I don’t think I’d ever have the urge to do it again. Although now the town-crier is my friend, and whenever I have parties he’s there and people ask, “Why is the town crier at your parties?” Because I didn’t really know him before.

CM: Tell me about two of my other favourites pieces, the sculptures of the bottle of Rush and the La Mer face cream.

JW: I can tell you about some of the great reactions I’ve gotten. I was giving my lecture at the 92nd street Y with Rob Storr, showing slides of my work. And just coincidentally in the audience were three of the women who run the La Mer company. They were stupefied when they saw it. So they came to the opening and brought me a $1000 bottle of La Mer. And the foundation bought the piece, which I loved.

And then I got a letter from the man who runs the company who owns Rush—and I always get paranoid at first that someone’s going to be mad—but he told me that he loved it and that he was sending me a lifetime supply of Rush. It looks great in the box. So many bottles. It’s so Warholian.  Now every time I do Rush I need more La Mer, so I’m really set for life. The Smile Train called but they didn’t send me a facelift.

CM: It’s funny because I heard you once say that companies would not want any of their products in your movies.

JW: No, they’d threaten to sue.

CM: But now it’s reverse.

JW: It is a little reverse in the art world. I always said that the art world and the movie world are opposite in a way. In the movie world we have to pretend that every person in the world has to love the movie. And in the art world if everyone loved it, it would really be terrible. You just need one person to love it. Mostly it's completely the opposite. But I’m still dealing with humour and still dealing with the movie business in some way.

I use La Mer crème. It’s one of the few luxuries I really do give myself and used to feel guilty about, but not anymore. And I do use poppers, but not as much as I pretend. Am I making fun of them? I’m making fun of myself for loving buying them. But yes, I like those products.

CM: Are they as great as they claim to be?

JW: La Mer is. You put it on a burn, and it completely heals it. I must admit every time I buy it I think, “Now does this really work?” And then I think, “Well, how ugly would you be if you didn’t use it?” And Rush is the poor man’s Viagra. And on Viagra labels it says to never use poppers at the same time, but I have friends who say, sure you can. It’s a low rent high. But if it's a high that only lasts three minutes, how bad can it be? I’ve never heard of anyone having a bad popper trip.

CM: Moving on. In the montage Hetero Flower Shop, are you saying that no gay man would make arrangements that awful?

JW: No. I am asking the question, “Can a hetero man be a good florist?” And the results speak for themselves. I was trying to imagine, if there were a florist that was sexist and only hired straight men, what would the flowers look like? And then I recreated those flower arrangements, inspired from real advertisements. But those are the kind of flowers that most people want to get in Middle America. If I got them I’d be furious. I’d call the person who sent them and say, “Look, I really thank you for sending me flowers, but I’ve got to tell you to change florists.” I got the idea because of a friend who was trying to get a new florist. She called the florist and said to the guy on the phone, "Is there a gay man there?" And he said, “Yeah, I’ve got a couple in the back. And she said, “Well, let me talk to them.” She told me, “You know, I don’t want a straight man doing my flowers.” Is that acceptable sexism? Is it a hate crime to ask if your florist is heterosexual? I’m trying to really analyse the situation for its sexual politics.

CM: Can you tell me about the process of putting together a montage like Rear Projection? ["Rear projection" is a movie term for the process in which a studio-filmed foreground action is combined with a previously shot background scene to give the impression the actors are on location.]

JW: I found each rear projection shot. Matt, my assistant, looked at hundreds of ass pornos, and then we took the pictures of them and isolated them and zoomed in and took them out of different frames. Then Brian Gossman, who does all my photo retouching, he put them in. I conceptualised it. I’m directing and editing it. It’s all about editing. It’s hardly about photography. I use photography. But it’s not about photography. That’s the least of what it’s about.

CM: Are you ever surprised with what you discover through the process? Does it ever turn out to be very different from what you've expected?

JW: Oh yes, completely. It’s impossible to get the right picture sometimes. You are running the video and just snapping in the dark with a hand held camera. Many times I leave in mistakes, which all contemporary artists do. Yes, you are always surprised when you get the film back, when something that you thought would really work didn’t. You might have an idea and you shoot all the photos and then when you put them together it just doesn’t work. But you just have to do it. But it is all thought up in the very beginning and what ends up is a variation of that original idea.

CM: How is it satisfying to you in a way that filmmaking isn’t?

JW: They are both satisfying in that they are both creative work. I don’t compare them; I don’t do them in the same place. I keep them very separate. Even though they both have humour. If you mean “satisfying” in terms of success, well, in the movie business I guess it would be how much the movie grosses, and in the art world it would be a sold out show. But the real thing you hope for in the movie business is a rave review from a critic you respect and the same thing in the art world. But both never really happen the way you want, in the same way they don’t make anything better. I learned a long time ago, with reviews you read the good ones twice and the bad ones once and then you put them away and never look at them again. But I do read them. I don’t believe anybody who says they don’t read them. But a lot of times in the artwork you do, the failure is better. Where in filmmaking, that doesn’t work. Well I guess you can have the failure of technique, but I just didn’t know any better. And the people who liked it would call it “raw” or “primitive” but that just meant “bad.” The same way in the art world when people use the word “rigorous.” It just means that other people can’t understand it.

I always thought movies are for the people and art is not for the people. Whenever they try to make art for the people it is a terrible idea.

CM: And that’s the inspiration for the piece Contemporary Art Hates You.

JW: It does hate some people. It hates the people who have contempt without investigation. People who say, “Aw, my kid could do that, that’s the most ridiculous thing.” It does hate them and it should hate them. And yes, those who do follow contemporary art and must learn the secret way to look at things, well, they're happy it hates those people. Because those people are too stupid to look.

CM: So contemporary art is not meant for widespread audiences.

JW: It could be if everyone would open up their mind enough and study enough and see enough so that they learn to see. Or learn to understand it. Or learn to be outraged by it. Which is what contemporary art is supposed to do in the first place—it’s suppose to wreck things, it’s suppose to destroy what came before. It’s suppose to alter what you think is good, I think. But unless you accept that and look for that or find delight or some kind of intellectual stimulation, it does hate you because you are stupid. And I don’t hate all stupid people, but I hate militantly stupid people.

TEXT BY CLAYTON MAXWELL
©picture John Waters
Detail from Hollywood Smile Train 2009, courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Dimitris Yeros

Shades of Love

My life is spent in the ebb and flow of pleasure, in erotic fantasies—sometimes realized.
My work leans toward thought.
Perhaps rightly so.
Then my work is like the amphora I mentioned. It allows for different interpretations.
And my love life has its own manifestation—obscure only to the ignorant. Expressed more broadly, it may not have been enough of an artistic field for me to stay, to be enough for me.
I work like the ancients. They wrote history, they created philosophy, dramas of a mythological tragic nature—sensual—so many of them—just like me.—C.P. CAVAFY

It is no surprise that Cavafy’s poetry would inspire a fellow Greek Greek photographer Dimitris Yeros. Cafavy’s life is rich in material: he was a gay poet at the turn of the 19th century who bucked norms and openly embraced his sexuality. Well-read and well travelled, he was both an aristocrat and polymath; he lived in Alexandria, England, Constantinople, and France, but spent the majority of his life in Alexandria. His poetry, however, was written in Greek; Yeros commissioned a new translation by David Connolly especially for this project. (Playwright Edward Albee writes the forward, and photography critic John Wood the introduction.) An amalgam of visual arts and literature that is both handsome and invitingly naughty, Shades of Love has attracted the attention of both poetry and photography lovers worldwide.

Yeros transforms this project into a particularly enlivening journey by pairing Cavafy’s poems with portraits of the world’s top men of arts and letters (with one Greek-American actress—Olympia Dukakis—as the exception.) Gore Vidal, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, David Leddick, Duane Michals, Jeff Koons, Naguib Mahfouz, Jean Baudrillard, and many more fill the pages of the book. This addition makes Shades of Love far more than just a coupling of poetry and photography: Yeros is taking the particular—one man’s poems—and highlighting their universal reach by bringing in new personalities to embody them. Shades of Love is a visual testament to these words that Cavafy wrote a hundred years ago: “I work like the ancients. They wrote history, they created philosophy, dramas of a mythological tragic nature—sensual—so many of them—just like me.” Just as Cavafy is like the ancients, so are Yeros and the colleagues he photographs.

But these famous men do not occupy the photos alone. They are flanked by hunky, naked youth—male models—who serve as a fascinating foil to the dignified older men in the photos. Yeros transforms what could have been a straight up portrait into visual dialogues about relationship and all of the complexities they can contain—yearning, nostalgia, lust, envy, love, etc—exactly what Cafavy explores through poetry.

Yeros is friends with most of the famous men he photographs, which partially explains the intimacy, humour and warmth his images possess—in some of them, you feel like you are getting an inside glimpse into the creative private world of close friends. The already-established relationship translates to a surprising ease in the images.

Shades of Love emphasizes Cavafy’s unusual outspokenness as a gay man. During the time he was writing, homosexuality was emphatically “thought shameful even to mention.” Which is another reason why Cavafy’s poetry is so unusual—he was speaking out in much bolder terms about his sexuality than any of his contemporaries, including Walt Whitman.

Shades of Love feels like a journey not only into Cavafy’s poetry, but also into the richness of Yeros’ world. In the afterward of the book, Yeros writes amusing anecdotes from the often complicated and bold photo shoots that went into its making. He tells how William Weslow, naked, would repeatedly interrupt the photo shoot to chase away the pigeons from his veranda, furiously waving his arms. And how Clive Barker refused to be shot naked because he didn’t want his penis to look smaller next to that of his partner. The very tales behind these images contain all of the drama, vanity, warmth and allure of a really good poem.                                                                           

But what about the beefcakes? What role do they play other than eye candy? Actually, given the tone of Cavafy’s poetry—that is probably the exact role they are supposed to play. So many of Cavafy’s poems focus on youthful beauty, placing their gaze on those hotties of the firm round buttocks and sculpted pecs, evocations of the Greek Ideal. In one photo, a young man stands amidst crumbling antiquities. His bottom faces us, as perfectly shaped as a marble statue of Eros. Yeros (whose name, I must note, is simply Eros with a Y) is deliberately playing with Greece’s history as centre of both the ideal human form and gay love since antiquity.

Cavafy’s poems drip with nostalgia and sexual longing. Many possess the voice of an older man whose memories of all consuming passion both feed and haunt him. Yeros’ images visually reinforce this lust for youth and beauty.

TEXT BY CLAYTON MAXWELL
image: Duane Michals and Douglas, New York, 2001,©Dimitris Yeros

Isaac Julien

'Looking for Langston' was made in 1989 when Julien was a member of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective. Written and directed by Julien, the 16mm film is subtitled ‘a meditation on’, rather than a documentary about, the poet Langston Hughes. A literary icon and leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Hughes championed black culture through his poems, critical commentary, novels and plays. But despite his acknowledged achievements and his fame, and his tributes to working people and the oppressed, he was unable openly to fight for the gay community; his sexuality remains ambiguous.
Both the film and the series of still images featured in the exhibition, present a world of uncontested beauty. Julien’s emphasis on lush visuality is embedded in his practice, and central to his examination of histories and communities that are socially, politically and geographically outside of the dominant ideological structures. For Julien, making work is always about challenging and rewriting the rules of representation. Langston Hughes shared a similar drive to rework prevailing notions of racial and social identity. According to critic Donald B. Gibson, “During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read . . . Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.”
As the narrative unfolds, the camera fluidly moves across different spaces, venturing through different historical eras, blending past and present, splicing historical document with imagination. In its poetic structure, the film also incorporates music, voice-over, poetry, and dramatic tableaux. The film begins with Hughes’ fictionalised funeral: mourners cluster around an open coffin as a woman’s voice (the artist recorded Toni Morrison speaking at James Baldwin’s memorial) eulogises the deceased. The man in the coffin (Hughes) is none other than Julien, which underlines the film’s personal nature and suggests the theme of historical identification.
In this work of radiant imagery and complex interweavings, the story journeys beyond death, beyond the funerary images reminiscent of Van Der Zee’s Harlem Book of the Dead, arriving in its principal setting, a nightclub - a glisteningly rich world of textured contrasts and silver tones. An otherworldly Cotton Club, perhaps, where angelic creatures preside, beautiful black-skinned young men in evening suits. Smoking. Dancing. Exchanging glances. A game of giving and receiving looks where the gaze of the film’s sole white protagonist carries a layered dynamic – desire, the eroticised look directed at the fetishized ‘other’. And yet the ‘looking’ of the title is about more than simply the eroticized look directed at the object of desire, it also implies the artist’s search to connect with the past – with a moment in history – a psychic, social space – with a particular figure.
The sequence of stills exists independently of the film. The compositions are staged pictures related to the film, rather than taken from it. Like the moving images, the stills are laden with associations; their smoky sculpturality, tonality and composition hint at film noire. Touches of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Jean Cocteau. Robert Mapplethorpe. There is an almost palpable sense of joy and love lost; a sense that these images may be an ode to forbidden beauty, to lives and times past. And yet beneath the sumptuous pictorial surface lurks the spectre of AIDS, at its height in the late eighties, adding a terrible poignancy and yet another complex thread to images that, for Julien, act as ‘memorial sites’: at times offering glimpses of the creative process while at others exploring moments of a questionable history. Surrounded by these images, the viewer becomes drawn into the dreamscape, an onlooker caught between histories and narratives.

TEXT BY LISA HOLDEN

©picture Isaac Julien, Film Noir Staircase, Ilford classic silver gelatin fine art paper, mounted on aluminum and framed Framed size 74.5 x 58.1 cm, Edition of 4 plus 2 APs, 1989-2016, courtesy Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam

About the artist
Isaac Julien is a Turner prize nominated artist and filmmaker. Julien has pioneered a form of multi-screen installations, including light-boxes and photographic works. Julien is currently producing a new work that is a poetic meditation on aspects of the life and architecture of Lina Bo Bardi. The first chapter of this work, ''Stones Against Diamonds'', was shown during 2015's La Biennale di Venezia, Art Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach, and is now also on view alongside Looking for Langston at Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam. After teaching at Harvard University (1998-2002), Julien was Professor of Media Art at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe (2009-2015) and Chair of Global Art at University of Arts London (2014-2016).

LOOKING FOR LANGSTON
Isaac Julien
Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam
25.11.2016 - 07.01.2017

Pawel Jaszczuk

Salaryman
    
In the early morning hours in Tokyo, a contingent of young men turns up in the thousands on subways, buses and thoroughfares. Judging by their similar dress code (suit, tie, and briefcase) they resemble humanoid worker ants. However, 12 to 14 hours later the same young men take on a different appearance. They frequent bars in Tokyo’s Shimbashi district, karaoke establishments in Shinjuku, and smoke non-stop, while drinking too much sake and shochu. Later, lying supine or on their sides, unconscious with their mouths agape, their bodies appear on steps and sidewalks, or draped over waiting-room benches like living rags. These are not the casualties of a sleeping sickness that plagues the general public but rather “darkly celebrated” victims of modern life in Japan. When their faces happen to reflect consciousness at all, their dazed, watery-eyed stares are highlighted by perspiration and dribble. Such details accentuate Pawel Jaszczuk’s Salaryman—a black-and-white series by the Polish-born photographer working in Tokyo. The mix of culture, tradition and social habits exhibited in Salaryman culminates in a perplexing combination of actions. Jaszczuk’s images inform, irritate and amuse at the same time.
 
While Salaryman documents, as it were, the down side of the Asian work ethic, which boldly demonstrates social habits and economic patterns unlike those of its Western counterpart, in a less distinct voice this photo-series addresses the fear of not earning enough money to finance the so-called good life. Fundamentally, this fear lies at the heart of these unusual portraits of young Japanese men in states of abandon. Over the past decades, the same fear has driven an entire generation of young men into the grip of 12-hour-long workdays in Japanese firms and agencies, as if they plan to become millionaires before reaching the ripe old age of 30. Added to their voluntary or imposed ambitiousness, and encouraged by peers and employers in many cases, comes the self-effacing habit of drinking too much.

The suggested stress on earning, destructively attached to alcohol consumption, constitutes only one aspect of Jaszczuk’s series, which he developed as an art project focused on an antihero of sorts, a character as controversial as legendary in Japanese society. Content-wise at least two other aspects surface in these images of workaholics enjoying their curiously condoned, alcohol-ridden after hours. On the one hand, the viewer recognises a vague if persistent connection to surreal literature (especially books with nightlife themes), and an estranging reference to film noir on the other.

Jaszczuk’s unflattering shots of inebriated men sleeping off their drinking binges on streets and in public places in Tokyo (after missing their trains and buses home and drinking too much despite their well-known low resistance to alcoholic) suggest an eerie reversal of Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties, the novel about a surreal brothel where male customers spend their time with unconscious women who remain “in a deathlike sleep” throughout the visit. Also, by virtue of the subjects’ poses and general aspect, Jaszczuk’s “male sleeping beauties” photographed dead drunk on street corners, subway platforms and at bus stops, suggest Weegee’s crime scene photography. Most significantly, these images make chilling and, at times, comical, references to “karōshi” or “death by overworking”.

Immediately following World War II the word “salaryman” became synonymous with the Japanese white-collar businessman, the ideal middle-class citizen, and the respected social climber. At that time the term frequently appeared in texts related to Japanese culture. Today such positive associations have vanished, and “salaryman” refers to a type of corporate existence in which drawing a salary perpetuates the day-to-day slavery suffered by office employees who lack the means (and sometimes the imagination) to escape their redundant existence. This results in the character previously held in esteem becoming more so an object of controlled pity (if not contempt) nowadays. Though candid and editorial on the surface, Jaszczuk’s images of men nose-diving into drunkenness are buoyed on the kind of questioning akin to artworks and not socially critical photo-essays. Accordingly, the photographer insists that Salaryman is neither judgmental nor critical. “My photography,” says Jaszczuk, “creates questions and not answers.”

As a graphic design student at the School of Visual Arts in Sydney, Australia, Jaszczuk first discovered his love of camerawork while attending a weekly photography course, and became a professional photographer after finishing his studies. In Tokyo, for the sake of placing his theme-oriented art projects, he works with an agency as well. But he would never refer to himself as a photojournalist or reporter. He produces editorial-like artworks, and his deep fascination with photographing unique people drew him to the salaryman as ideal subject matter. There was hardly a more absorbing and chameleonic character to photograph. As Jaszczuk remarks, “Photographing the salaryman means shooting someone who presents himself one way in the morning and another way at night.” As socially critical statements go, this is a far cry from a young Polish artist, born 1978, commenting on a public issue.

During the making of Salaryman, Jaszczuk showed the utmost respect for the privacy of his various “models”. Also, no one that he spent time with was ever photographed asleep in public. He guarded the identity of the men who generously shared their family problems with him, relating issues that evolved from heavy drinking and ranged from husbands accused of neglect to couples filing for divorce. These modern-day cases, which reiterate the salaryman’s existence in Japan since the middle of the 1940s, underscore how the term has always been used to express the merging of a social creature with a social phenomenon, while using the unmistakable image of a man devastated by the after-effects of working long hours, or better, the persistent image of a “work ethic” man, in suit and tie, striking the twisted pose of a fallen worker.
 
Jaszczuk, who claims to have neither judged the salaryman nor felt particularly inspired by other photographers as he worked, employs a decidedly present-day style for his series, and it functions without referencing any known schools of Japanese contemporary photography. Instead, while consciously ignoring Japan’s versatile world of fashion photography and the likes of Eikoh Hosoe’s poignant aesthetics, Jaszczuk’s series seems to hint at the troubling insights of Diane Arbus and the contortions of the models that appear in Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities series. If nothing else, the questions and suggestions brought to life in Salaryman speak for the breadth of Jaszczuk’s simple but enormously powerful photographs.    

TEXT BY KARL E. JOHNSON

©image by Pawel Jaszczuk

Brian D. Miller

Sarah was her name and that was the only thing I really knew about her. She drifted in and out of my life after a violent encounter with a dangerous man. She shot him for what he tried to do and I had no problem with that. He did not have a name but she wanted me to act as if I were him, to speak like him, to move like him. She made me do this if I wanted to know what really happened. I made myself feel rage at all times, to suffer a mixture of aggression and powerlessness. I came to grips with a constant dull hatred and used my fists to get what I wanted. In my sleep I ground my teeth in frustration. I took advantage of weakness in others. What little light there ever was, is still here now.

I found her standing by the side of a road in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where I lived. I saw her as I was driving by and pulled over to see if she needed help. At first she ignored me, and acted as if I wasn’t there. I repeatedly asked if she needed help but she just stared into the forest. Eventually she looked in my direction, made eye contact and without saying a word got into my truck. I got into the drivers seat and asked where she needed to go. Again she said nothing. I asked if she lived around here, knowing that there were no houses for several miles in either direction. She did not respond. I asked if she wanted a ride home but she still would not speak. I asked if she needed to go to the hospital and with this question she again looked into my eyes. But still she stayed silent. Finally out of desperation I asked if she wanted to go to a bar and she said yes.

She said that if I gave her a place to stay that I could photograph her any way I wanted. I told her to be careful about that kind of offer and she said that there wasn’t anything that I could think of that she would not want to do.

She never left my house. I would leave for work in the morning. She would stay in bed. I don’t know when she got up. By the time I got home from work she was usually occupying herself, playing with my dog or reading one of my books. She never left the house or even made a phone call. As far as I know she had no contact with the outside world while she stayed with me.

I made the mistake of telling her that some of my plates used to belong to my former girlfriend, Pearl. When I got home from work that night she broke half of them. She said that only half were actually mine.

One night after dinner she told me that she had to leave. I knew that this was coming and that there was nothing I could do to change her mind.  But she did not need to leave that night. She had been with me for three weeks. Three days later I drove her to the spot on route 25C, where I found her. We didn’t talk much on the drive. I asked her where she would go and what she would do. She said she didn’t know but that she would manage. I helped her with her bag and kissed her goodbye. She said she loved me. As I drove away I looked back. She was walking down a dirt road into the woods. The next day I went back, I had to know what happened to her. But there was nothing to suggest that she had ever been there, not even a footprint. I walked back into the woods for about a mile but it became too swampy to continue. I never saw her again.

She smelled like the forest after rain, with a faint hint of something floral. She told me what it was but I can’t remember any more. There is so much I have forgotten. She had a lipstick called “Trailer Trash”. I made her put it on for the pictures. She also had a loose dress that looked more like a slip. She wore it most of the time.

I woke up in the middle of the night about two weeks after she left. I thought I heard her voice saying something. I got up and looked around in the house but she wasn’t there. But it smelled like she had just left, I could smell her in every room.

When I photographed her I became obsessed or even possessed. I didn’t care about her or even myself, I was only concerned with the pictures. I would have done anything I had to. I was cruel at times and I don’t know why she stayed with me. She never complained, even when she was cold or tired or angry. Other times she would try to do things I could not photograph, things which could not or maybe should not be remembered. She said we were like crows, living off dead things and if we stayed together we would both rot.

Her eyes were grey. When she was cold they were a watery blue. Her lips had no colour and so she always wore lipstick. Her hair was dirty blond and messy. Her hands were always cold. Her fingernails also had no colour but were very clean. Her voice was low but she spoke loudly. There was never any doubt in her words.

TEXT BY BRIAN D. MILLER

©picture Brian D. Miller

Samuel Fosso

Born in Kumba in Cameroon and based in Bangui in the Central African Republic, Fosso is one Africa's most eminent photographers. A year after his work was discovered at the first edition of the Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine photography festival in Mali in 1994, he won the Afrique en création prize. His work has been compared to that of Cindy Sherman. Indeed, when Fosso, 46, discovered Sherman’s work in 1996 at Les Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, he was surprised by the similarities in their staged self-portraiture that rely on the photographer being both an actor and a director.
Formally, his work has been compared to that of the great Malian photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé. Fosso even chose to reinvent himself as Keita for one of the self-portraits in his African Spirits series.

Fosso invested a significant amount of research into the realisation of each carefully staged image in African Spirits. Every one of them is based on a photograph that Fosso has faithfully reinterpreted in order to assume a different identity. This has involved everything from the backdrop, hired costumes, make-up and hair-styling to Fosso practising each character’s facial expressions.

We see Fosso as Martin Luther King making an impassioned speech and in a mug shot image taken after King’s arrest in 1956, his prisoner’s plaque with the number 7089 hanging round his neck. Fosso also presents himself as Malcolm X, Miles “Dewey” Davis, and as Angela Davis, the American political activist and university professor who is the only woman that Fosso portrays in this series.

For another image, Fosso restaged the Esquire 1968 cover of Muhammad Ali in which Ali appears impaled by six arrows, martyred as St. Sebastian, a patron saint of athletes. (It alluded to his refusal to be conscripted into the US army to fight in the Vietnam War because of his Muslim beliefs. Consequently, Ali was stripped of the World Title and had his boxing license revoked.) Fosso also poses as Tommie Smith raising his fist into the air after receiving his medal for winning the 200-metre sprint in the 1968 Olympics.

Other images pay homage to important, 20th century African leaders. We see
Fosso as Nelson Mandela wearing white African robes, a beaded, tribal collar and arm bracelet; the photograph was released by the African National Congress in the 1960s.

Fosso also honours Aimé Césaire, the poet, dramatist, statesman and former deputy of Martinique in the French National Assembly, and Léopold Senghor, the former President of Senegal. They were both principal founders of the concept of negritude—the awareness of the cultural and historical consequences of being African, or of having African descent, in a then white-dominated world.

Equally, Fosso imagines himself as Patrice Emery Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah. Lumumba was the first legally elected Prime Minister of the Republic of Congo after he helped win its independence from Belgium in June 1960; his government was deposed in a coup during the Congo Crisis, and Lumumba was imprisoned and murdered. Similarly, Nkrumah, the first head of an independent Ghana who led his country to independence in 1957, was overthrown in a coup nine years later and died in exile.
The other African leader Fosso role-plays is Haile Selassie, Ethiopia's last emperor and one of the founding fathers of the Organisation of African Unity. He is regarded by many as the figurehead of African independence for his defiance against the Italian colonial invasion in the 1930s.

Anna Sansom: What was your childhood in Cameroon and then Nigeria like?

Samuel Fosso: I was born in Cameroon in 1962. But I had a paralysing illness, and was paralysed in the arms and the legs. So when I was three, my mother took me to the south-eastern part of Nigeria, in Biafra, to be healed; that’s where her parents, brothers and sisters all lived. My grandfather was both village chief and healer. After I was healed, I continued living with my grandparents and in the meantime my mother died. Then the Biafra War broke out and we didn’t have any means to survive. One of my uncles, who had escaped and opened a small footwear factory in Bangui, came to get me in 1972 and I worked in his factory.

AS: How did you come to open your first photography studio when you were 13?

SF: I walked past by a studio owed by a Nigerian—at that time, there were only two photographers in Bangui: one from Cameroon and then this man. My uncle’s wife convinced my uncle to let me work for the Nigerian photographer as an apprentice. Then I opened my first studio, the Studio Photo National, on 14 September 1975, using 6 x 8 films. People came to do family photos, photos with friends, National Holidays, New Years… For me, taking photos for clients was utopian because I was in my own studio.

AS: I read that you started making self-portraits because you wanted to send them to your grandmother.

SF: Yes, when I started taking photographs, I took the opportunity to make self-portraits that I could send to her, to reassure her that there were no problems and that everything was going well for me. At night, I used the scraps of leftover film to take my self-portraits. I used American magazines, especially photos of black musicians like James Brown. To create the outfits, I bought fabrics and took them to a tailor. I showed him the pictures in the magazines so he could make me clothes that I could wear for my self-portraits. That’s how I started. I would also design the décor.

AS: You were also interested in politics?

SF: I was always alone, and I listened to the radio and watched television, and followed the politicians and history. And I realised that it was because of the rich people and the politicians that I suffered during my childhood with the Biafra War. That’s what made me want to look into who was good and who was bad. And when I became an artist in 1994, I thought it was important to communicate what I thought about this.

AS: How was your work discovered?

SF: I was discovered in 1993 by a Frenchman called Bernard Descamps, who was looking for photographs for Afrique en création to present at the first edition of Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine [“Meetings of African Photography”] in Bamako, Mali. So he was curious about meeting African photographers. Somebody I know heard about this and brought him to meet me in my studio. I showed him my colour pictures but he wanted the older photos from the 70s and 80s that I had kept. Whenever I would make my self-portraits back then, I would send one picture to my grandmother and keep one for myself so that if I ever got married one day I could show them to my children.
Bernard took my work away in his suitcase and the next year I was invited to participate in the exhibition in Bamako. The president of the Republic of Mali came. I was very happy and honoured. He asked if I sold my photos, but I didn’t know what that meant. After that, I exhibited all over the world and that’s how the sales of my photos started.

AS: How did participating in Africa Remix at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and then at the Southbank Centre in London help your career?

SF: Africa Remix didn’t change my life because my work had already been exhibited a lot before. Since my work was discovered in 1994, I never stopped showing elsewhere. I’ve shown all over the world.

AS: What was the starting point for African Spirits?

SF: It follows on from my earlier Tati series and shows black identity. I want to pay homage to what these black people did. Because I am a black man and you are a white woman and today we are talking together. It’s grandeur for me. And some of these men sacrificed themselves for this. I made the series in black-and-white photography because I feel as if I am in my natural colours.

AS: Where were the photos made?

SF: I set up my studio here in the gallery. I put up the décor and hired the clothes. In Europe there are always people who keep old costumes.

AS: The photograph you’ve made of Mohamed Ali reinterprets the 1968 cover of Esquire magazine. Why did you choose this portrait of him?

SF: Even though he was alive, Mohamed Ali was dead in his heart because of the suffering of the black Americans. It reminds me of the segregation of black Americans. They suffered more than the Africans. Their ancestors were put in chains to go to America for centuries and centuries and centuries.

AS: Do you have a favourite image?

SF: The one of Nelson Mandela. In October 1980, I received my passport and I could go anywhere except South Africa. That was because of him, because he was in prison. I’ve never met him.

AS: Who else would you like to portray in your self-portraits?

SF: There are other people that I would like to include too, like Ghandi and Mao. I’m only one person but I facilitate things. I’m a defender of all of them; I communicate the past in the present.

AS: Have you ever portrayed your grandmother?

SF: No, but I think I will one day.

AS: I read that your neighbours in Bangui aren’t even aware of your status as a successful artist.

SF: My neighbours do not know me as a photographer, for my own security. In fact they think I’m doing magic! They don’t really understand the idea of being an artist-photographer. But it would be stupid to live in Europe. I have my life over there.

TEXT BY ANNA SANSOM
©image Samuel Fosso

Leo Rubinfien

Leo Rubinfien witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 from his own terrace in lower Manhattan. As traumatic as it was to experience the event so closely, it took many months for Rubinfien to formulate his response to the experience and years to develop this response into his book Wounded Cities (Steidl, 2008). The photographs come from more than 20 cities that have been struck by significant terror attacks in recent years. Eyemazing met with Rubinfien in San Francisco.

As an introduction to the project, Rubinfien explained:

Leo Rubinfien: I think in the United States we like to imagine that September 11 was unique, but events like it have really been going on all over the world for quite some time. I spent the months afterward walking, standing on street corners, looking at people around me and wondering, who are you…who are you? Do you fear what I fear? What do you want? Later, I began to photograph people as if the pictures might contain clues or answers to the questions I had. They couldn’t, of course, but the work still seemed to express the wish that they could. For Wounded Cities I visited places that had experienced terror back as far as the early 1990s, but there are no pictures of victims. Few of the pictures come from specific sites of violence. These are all ordinary people. Everyone is a potential victim but there’s no way to know more than that.

Heather Snider: In Wounded Cities you write about how you and your family were living very close to the World Trade Center on September 11. Can you describe your personal experience of that morning?

LR: I was close to what happened but I don’t want to suggest that that was exceptional. I was just nearby; it happened in my neighbourhood. Many people were much closer. One remarkable aspect of terror attacks is that you can be just a short distance away and see a horrible thing happening in front of your nose, yet still be safe. I was working at my desk when I heard the terrible noise of the first plane coming downtown over Tribeca. It was very low and moving very fast, making a roaring, shrieking sound. I went out and watched, thinking it must have a mechanical problem and that the pilot was trying to reach the harbour. Then, astonishingly, it went directly into the building before me. For a year afterward I was in despair and didn’t believe I could do anything with photography in response to what had happened. I didn’t think photographing the ruins, or the victims, would tell me anything.

HS: What were you doing in your photography just previous to this event and were you able to continue with it, or did everything change at that moment?

LR: I was working on a book that the attacks made me set aside, though now I’m ready to return to it. That book was based on my belief—not far from a feeling many people had in the 1990s—that we were in a new era in which the world was knitting itself together happily, prosperously, peacefully. But after September 11 all that seemed appallingly simple to me. The whole story of globalisation is far more mysterious and complicated and darker than I’d realised.

What we experienced in 2001 was a form of warfare, of course, and the unusual thing was that it had burst in on people who hadn’t thought they were at war. The sudden intrusion of war into the peace in which we were used to living was utterly shocking. It gave people a mental wound that was perhaps even more profound than the physical damage. It would drive our actions on every level—personal, political—and it would last a very long time. So the question for me was how to photograph when photographs only show surfaces, and can’t describe an inner wound. For a year I was stuck, but then, in 2002, I was in Tokyo when the first Bali bombings occurred. The people around me seemed to take them very hard. They’d had the Aum Shinrikyo attacks in the 1990s, and the Kuta Beach bombings brought the emotion of those days back in an instant. I began to see that everything you cannot tell, looking at a person, is no less interesting than what you think you can tell, and so I began to see how to do this book.

HS: This idea of culling the mood of a people, taken unaware from a public space is reminiscent of Walker Evans’ subway photographs…

LR: Evans, along with August Sander, is very important to me, but unlike the Evans subway subjects, most of the Wounded Cities people knew they were being photographed, and much of the emotion you see in them comes out of that.

HS: When you started this body of work, was your intention so clearly defined, that you would go to places that have experienced significant terrorist events, and then look for the impact, if any, in the faces of the population? Or did your theme emerge as you were working?

LR: I knew I’d go to cities that had been attacked, but the project grew deeper as I worked. The first picture I knew was strong was of a girl on the street in Japan (Tokyo, 2002, at Shibuya Station). There was a strangeness to the encounter—between me, between the viewer, and her. She is an interesting and odd-looking girl by herself, OK, but there was also her suspicion of the person looking at her, and that quality seemed to be expressed not only by her eyes but by her blanched face and uncanny orange hair and other things too, as if she’d been shocked into looking as she looked. When I saw this I thought yes, this has the “skewed-ness” of the world I’m in now and I could see the path I wanted to go down.

HS: And if this was your starting point, where was your ending point?

LR: In Palestinian Hebron, earlier this year, on the last of 15 or 20 trips I made for the project. Hebron has experienced freelance violence for 100 years. The most famous event was in 1994, when a Jewish doctor murdered many Muslim men who were praying in the shared mosque-synagogue at the core of the city. But smaller brutalities have taken place almost continually.

HS: How was working on this project different from other work you have done? There seems to be a moral passion behind this work…

LR: I was aware of something like that. The first thing I was, after the attacks, was furious: outraged that this could have been done, not just to my family, my city, but also to all those individuals. A person who detonates a bomb in a crowd makes people out to be representatives of an idea, not the unique, private beings that they are. This abstracting, this erasure of the individuality of people that was implicit in the attacks was unbearable to me. Wounded Cities says over and over again: look at this person. There’s a fierce insistence on the individuality of the people throughout it.

HS: You combine both black and white and colour in Wounded Cities, how did this dual approach unfold?

LR: For many years I’d photographed mostly in colour, but something about this subject made black and white more appropriate. Initially I thought the ratio would be 50/50, but as I progressed, the question was whether to keep the colour work at all, when 90 percent of the best pictures were in black and white. But in assembling the book I liked the way the colour disrupted the picture sequence. Just when you felt you knew what was happening, a colour picture would knock you out of that, and remind you how subjective the pictures, the writing, really were—that every picture represented just a way of seeing, a way of asking.

HS: There is a statement you made in the foreword of your previous book, A Map of the East, that your work might “be difficult for [the person] who looks for a picture’s stylistic response to whatever happened last year in the world of art.” Though I agree with you that this is true in your photography, your position is intriguing considering that you are not only an artist but also a well known writer and critic actively engaged in the art world. How do you keep these sides of yourself distinct, or do you?

LR: I’ve never written about the art world. Only about art, and only a little of it. I’m not a critic. I like writing about how pictures strike me. A real critic has an interest in how a given field is developing, but I’ve never been like that. I’ve tried to say what I was trying to understand about certain photographers, in the course of doing my work as one. All artists, whether they articulate it or not, are constantly in private dialogue with work by others, looking and thinking and figuring out why the object here touches them more than the one over there. I’ve simply tried to convey how that dialogue runs in my own mind.

HS: You were a friend and admirer of Garry Winogrand at an earlier time in your life. Do you wonder what he would think about the Wounded Cities?

LR: It would make me happy if he said “good job,” I suppose, but I don’t think about it. I’ve taken this project as far as I can. There not much more I can do, it’s done, it is what I lived through, or near enough, and there’s little there that could usefully be changed. There’s nothing phoney in it.

HS: In Wounded Cities you say that what the world has been caught up in recently is not war, but a state in which war and peace go on at the same time, and in which the peace blinds you to the extent of the violence that’s also going on. After spending so much time investigating this idea, and looking at the spirit of people in the street, do you see our world moving towards peace or war?

LR: I’m not a political analyst. I respond to the world too impressionistically to be one. So while there’s a lot about politics in the book, it’s always with the aim of discovering how large events strike upon the life of an ordinary person. The book’s subject is how phenomena like September 11 invade our private lives. I don’t want to speak of where we are going, or how we should behave, or what we should do—there are professionals who know more about that than I’ll ever know. I greatly admire the logical abilities of real analysts. I can only evoke what a few of the conundrums by which we are trapped feel like.

I’ve never been much of a political person and even less a political artist. The book is concerned with political events for how they bend the lives of individual people. In the end, they are what fascinate me. It is a real issue, though, for Americans, that for decades our government has committed warlike acts without our quite knowing it. On one hand, our officials often prefer not to talk about them; on the other, we haven’t wanted to know. We haven’t wanted the responsibility. And so our country has done much damage while turning its eyes away from its own hands. I’m not sure this is something we can safely continue to do. It seems difficult to sleep as we have in the past.

TEXT BY HEATHER SNIDER
©image Leo Rubinfien

Rahi Rezvani

An Iranian-born, Amsterdam-based photographer, is a gifted storyteller. In Retreat to Nowhere, a rich, smoky series of cinematic photographs set to elegiac music, Rezvani combines his talents as com­poser, photographer, and filmmaker to bring us the story of Linda, a woman who lost everything because of war. Rezvani, who worked as a graphic designer in Teheran and a photographer in The Hague, is no stranger to war. Here, through the story of Linda, Rezvani invites the viewer to travel through her life and remember that the losses of war far outdate the fighting. He gives Linda a voice because, as he says at the end of the interview, “People need to talk, don’t they?” EYEMAZING catches up with Rezvani about his project.

Clayton Maxwell: To view Retreat to Nowhere, I listened to the music on your website and scrolled through the images several times. The story of Linda become increasingly moving the longer I delved into it. I love how the images tell Linda’s full life story, and really connect with how the suffering and loneliness towards the end of her life are so intimately tied to the losses she suffered as a young girl. Why do you think it’s important to tell her full life story?

Rahi Rezvani: I’m against war. During Linda’s life she experiencedwar twice, plus she lost her lover during the Dutch/Indonesian war that happened between the two world wars. Many years later she lost her child, because of her life during these wars. Her life story is about surviving. How much sadness can a person handle in their life?

CM: Did you make this series as a way to awaken compassion and respect for people you might otherwise write-off or disregard?

RR: Yes, I believe that our generation often has no idea of the freedom we live in. When you look at the miserable people we sometimes meet in the street and you see their defencelessness, I feel this tragedy should be told to learn from and to treat these people with more respect.

CM: This series made me consider more fully the lasting heartache of war and how families continue to suffer long after the fighting is over. My grandmother lost her husband in WWII: she said that when she visited the WWII cemetery at Normandy, instead of thinking about all the dead soldiers, she thought about all of the widows left to fend for themselves.
How did you become interested in a story like Linda’s? Have you or anyone you know had a more difficult path because of war?

RR: When I was a child I saw war through my own eyes, between Iran and Iraq for eight years. There are so many people like Linda with the same destiny in life. Linda’s story is not just a story. It is still going on and for her it is impossible to step out of her misery.

CM: Could you please explain to me the multi-media concept behind Retreat to Nowhere? You say it is the first time that a film is in a book and an exhibition, could you elaborate? Could you please tell me how the project would be experienced in an exhibition space?

RR: In the exhibition, the book is viewed in a completely dark surrounding with a spotlight on the book. The space is filled with the soundtrack. There is nothing that takes your attention away from the photos. It becomes a film in a book.
The flashback technique that is used in film is now used for photography. The soundtracks I composed over the images give people the feeling that they are watching a movie. A lot of people asked me during the exhibitions whether the images were collected and put together as a book. All of the images were created. Costumes, styling, make-up, models, etc. were chosen for each photo.
During the exhibition, people – especially older people – reacted sometimes very emotionally. Others went through the big books, over and over again, or came back to show it to others.

CM: Please tell me more about the music and the relationship it has with your images. Do you create them together or are they independent?

RR: I created them both together. When an image was finished, I put it by beamer [projector] on the wall for a few days and composed the music. Sometimes I used sound effects from the situation in the picture. (For example, in the shot where Linda is dancing on the table, I used background sounds from people enjoying themselves in a bar.)
CM: The photo of Linda as an orphaned girl, huddling in her bed alone is heartbreaking and very beautiful. It shows such pathos for the fragility of an innocent child. Is photographing children very different from photographing adults?

RR: This is an interesting question. Let me first explain the meaning of the two pages.
Linda told me that the nuns punished her when she could or did not read the bible. Children had to sleep on the floor of the kitchen as a punishment. In this image, you see her lying on the floor with the bible open and curtains that are blown by the wind. Meaning the window is open and you can see the moon. The moon stands for loneliness.

There is no specific difference in photographing grown-ups or children. I spent a lot of time talking to the girl in the photographs and explaining Linda’s destiny. She understood well. She got my feeling and she responded this way. The moon is not a picture – it is painted.

CM: Your images have such a smoky and film noir quality. Why are you drawn to that aesthetic?

RR: These images are a flashback and I believe that “unsharp and noisy” images are closer to the images in your memory. It also gives a cinematic feel to the images.

CM: For me, one of the hardest parts about the story is the fact that the son abandons Linda. Her other relationships – with her parents and with her lover – dissolved because of war and death. But this is some one who chose to leave her. Why isn’t her son more compassionate about her past?

RR: The only answer I got from Linda is that she was confronted with Linda’s past and people called her a prostitute. He could not handle that. I don’t know exactly what happened between them.

CM: The image of Linda’s lover getting shot in the war is powerful. It reminds me a bit of Robert Capa’s famous image, The Fallen Soldier, from the Spanish Civil War. This action image must have been a challenge to stage. Could you tell me more about how you created it? Where was it shot?

RR: The story was that Linda’s lover was shot first in his knee so he could not run away and the second shot was in his neck. For me, it was more interesting to get the right feeling of the moment when he is asking the Indonesian soldier, “Please, don’t.” His raised hand shows this. We spent hours and hours on how to get the expression right in his eyes, mouth, feet and hand. The helmet had to be perfectly right after he is shot in the neck. The image was shot in a place in my neighbourhood. I used an Indonesian model; Linda’s lover is a friend I play football with.

The point of this book is that it is a mixture of techniques. Some of the shots are paintings, some are shot in a reportage way, some are made with a documentary approach. In the end it is all about telling Linda’s story.

CM: Tell me about the photo of the open armoire in the empty room. What part does it play in telling this story?

RR: For a lot of people it is a normal picture. Each person has his own armoire inside. Often it is old or broke. The door is open, because Linda’s story is ongoing. In her bedroom there is the picture of mother and son on the wall, meaning they are still living there together. The doll, from her childhood, lies on top of the armoire. In the picture where Linda’s son attacks her, you can see the armoire is open and Linda’s hand is reaching inside the armoire. This refers to her life story.
There is an old Persian saying that some people have an armoire inside of them and that they save everything in this armoire. Some people die without opening their armoire, some people are brave enough to open it.

CM: The final photograph of a large bottom on a bar stool with a walking cane near by is very poignant and one of my favourite in the series. It says so much about aging and the anonymity or invisibility many older people must experience. Why did you choose this as the final image?

RR: It is the end of the story up till now, meaning today. It is the only photo with a documentary character. Linda had one place to go to, she worked there for free and it helped her to solve part of her loneliness. But the bar closed, and Linda is now without a job and is more miserable and lonely then ever.

CM: How long have you been working on this project? Given the tragic subject matter, was it an emotionally difficult project for you?

RR: Technically I worked on Retreat to Nowhere for six months. It was not difficult to understand Linda’s story, but to translate her story into images has taken a long time and a lot of energy. But the project was really the result of ten years working and studying as a graphic designer in Teheran and as a photographer in The Hague.

CM: Can you tell me about your background as a photographer? How did you get into it? Who and what inspires you to take photos?

RR: When I was 15 I was an assistant of a set designer in Iranian cinema. One day the photographer, who was supposed to make cinematic photos, did not show up. They asked me to make the pictures. It was my very first photo shoot. I had success and suddenly had a job as a photographer. I do love painting and graphic design. Both are very connected for me and that is why I studied both of them in the East. Than I came to the West and found it interesting to understand the culture of the West through art. Photography became the next study. Photography is my sickness. I talk through my images. People need to talk, don’t they?

Text by Clayton Maxwell

© picture: Rahi Rezvani