Issue Archives | Page 17 of 21

Peter J. Cohen

Snapshots of Dangerous Women

Book review by Susan Bright

I am writing this review in the wake of yet another public shooting in America. Flicking through Snapshots of Dangerous Women I am struck by the amount of photographs of women with guns. This, of course, is a symbol of a particular sexual fantasy, but these photographs are different from the ‘women with gun’ trope that may spring to mind. These are not objectified women in unlikely scenarios posing in order to validate fantasies – they are candid snapshots. They don’t feel dangerous in the way guns really are. Instead, the women here feel rather fierce and altogether comfortable with their weapons. Often, the pictures of them come across as elicit.

So the title Snapshots of Dangerous Women rankles. These women are not dangerous (and if they are then I would ask dangerous to whom? The answer, of course, is obvious – I don’t have to spell it out). Instead, these women are happy, free, strong, often goofy, and rather glorious. They are young Americans and the photographs of them range from the early twentieth century to the 1950s. They are women enjoying themselves heartily: drinking, smoking, dancing, driving fast cars, fighting, fishing or just posing with a free abandonment and glorious self-confidence. Or, to put it another way, it shows women behaving just like men.

I read that the collector, Peter J. Cohen – from whose vast collection of vernacular photographs these snapshots are sourced – wanted the title to be deliberately provocative. But it doesn’t feel that way; it feels more like a marketing ploy for sales. And this is a great shame as it is really a terrific selection of snapshots that say a great deal about the social and familial conditions of the time they were taken.

The scholar Geoffrey Batchen claims that “snapshots show the struggles of particular individuals to conform to the social expectations, and visual tropes, of their sex and class […] everyone simultaneously wants to look like themselves and like everyone else […] Before all else, snapshots are odes to conformist individualism”¹. Not so for these women. They have no desire to look like anyone but themselves and do the complete opposite of what is expected of their sex and class.

Batchen’s writing on snapshots, from only seven years ago, shows how much the culture of the photography has changed in this time. He states that snapshots have relatively little market or museum value. This has has shifted dramatically recently as museums reconsider their relationship with vernacular photography, both in terms of acquisitions and display. Auctions now regularly include more vernacular photography of the early-to-middle twentieth century, and flea market prices for albums and collections can be somewhat astonishing. The way we express ourselves in our own life narratives online has become an increasingly prolific part of photographic culture, too, and, as result, vintage snapshots have become all the more valuable. The very fact that books like this are made goes someway to illustrating this.

The book itself is perfect: it’s not too big. Snapshots need to be kept to near their original size in publications. To blow them up too big makes a mockery of their purpose and charm. To make them too small turns them into treasured jewels – which, by their very nature, they are not. The uncut pages take any preciousness away and the mix of full bleed and reproductions of the full photograph means the book has a good fast rhythm that doesn’t feel at all repetitive. The mix between the reproduction of image and object is beautifully balanced.

The introduction is formed by a series of quotes and facts about various women and events covering the period under examination. They are structured in short pithy sentences. This is just right for the book. Mia Fineman (Curator of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) has curated and written about vernacular photography and the range of quotes she has sourced shows she has spent time with the collection, and really understands the social conditions for women of the times, whilst simultaneously rooting for their more unconventional lifestyles.

The most beguiling images are those of groups of women together or two friends. My favourite is what looks like a sleepover. It shows four women lounging drunkenly together. They are bunched up to get in the frame at what feels like the end of the evening. They are all smoking; one holds a near-empty bottle up in a drunken yet triumphant gesture. The woman on the far left is dressed in dashing striped pyjamas and you have to look twice to see that she is a woman as her short cropped hair is at odds with her beautifully manicured nails. The room is a mess and it’s only too easy to imagine the awful hangovers that will haunt them all the following day. I imagine them smooching around together eating vast amounts, empty-headed, laughing, and napping whenever they get a chance.

But although the collection is joyous, it also left me feeling a little melancholic. How awful that women had to hide this side of their character away only to be revealed in the privacy of their own environment and to somebody they trusted behind the camera. In the photographic culture today, where vernacular photography can be understood in terms of the selfie and other online versions of self, the judgement of how women should and should not act in front of the camera continues, as evidenced by the vast amount of writing on the supposed narcissism and shallowness of (mainly younger) women. Wouldn’t photographic representations be all the more richer if women felt they could behave how they damn well pleased and not be shamed, judged, fetishised, or, indeed, labelled as ‘dangerous’ for having done so? ♦

¹Batchen, G. (2008). “Snapshots.” Photographies 1(2): 121-142.

All images courtesy of Rizzoli. © Peter J. Cohen

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Susan Bright is a curator and writer. Her published books include Art Photography Now (2005), Face of Fashion (2007), How We Are: Photographing Britain (2007: co-authored with Val Williams) Auto Focus (2010) and Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood (2013). The exhibition How We Are: Photographing Britain was the first major photographic exhibition of British photography at Tate. The exhibition of Home Truths (Photographers’ Gallery and the Foundling Museum and traveling to MoCP, Chicago and Belfast Exposed) was named one of the top exhibitions of 2013/2014 by The Guardian and The Chicago Tribune. Bright was visiting scholar at the Art Institute Boston in 2014. She currently lives in Paris and is completing her PhD in Curatorial Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Michael Etzensperger

Normal Viewpoint, No Other Than The Direct Frontal View

Essay by Martin Jaeggi

The title of Michael Etzensperger’s series of photographs Normal Viewpoint, No Other Than The Direct Frontal View has a decidedly authoritarian ring to it, one that seems at odds with the photographer’s delight in pictorial invention. It is in fact a quote derived from an 1890 text on how to photograph sculpture by the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), a pioneer of formalist approaches to art history.

Wölfflin championed the assiduous study of artworks’ surfaces and formal characteristics in order to analyse art history as a succession of clearly delineated styles that take precedence over the individual artist. Most notably, he investigated the shifts of artistic vision from Renaissance to Baroque. His emphasis on the close, visual study of artworks led him to advocate the use of slide projections in teaching art history yet also instilled in him an awareness of the problems of photographic representation. In his essay on how to photograph sculpture, he lombasted photographers who took artistic license when instead they should, he said, be merely documenting and not using it as an opportunity to showcase their ingenuity. In short, he proposed a strict set of rules, based on rigorous formal analysis, which ultimately set out to curtail the creativity of the photographer. Etzensperger explains: “[Wölfflin] supported the thesis that a sculpture cannot be photographed from any given angle, but that it requires the correct viewpoint of its viewer – in general the front view. From this position, the viewer needs one single glance to see the sculpture’s shape, contour and proportion at its highest point of perfection.”

Michael Etzensperger developed an interest in sculpture during a stay in Brussels, where he discovered a book by the conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers and photographer Julien Coulommiers, Statues de Bruxelles, which showed the city’s abundant sculptures from unusual angles – coincidentally taking the very approach that Wölfflin so passionately attacked. The publication inspired Etzensperger to search for unusual and playful ways to register sculpture that would highlight the photographic illusionism at work via that very act of the representation – the slippery interplay of sculpture’s physicality and the flat, surface qualities of photography.

Hence, it is no surprise that Wölfflin’s dogmatic, yet persuasively argued essay piqued Etzensperger’s interest when he chanced upon it as part of his research on interdisciplinary practice. Etzensperger picked up on the fact that at the heart of Wölfflin’s treatise was the proliferation of photographic art books that existed around the turn of the century – status symbols for a bourgeois audience keen to display their education and cultural sensibilities. Etzensperger began to collect early twentieth century photobooks on sculpture and used them as source material for collages that he would then rephotograph. Reinterpreting Wölfflin’s text, Etzensperger creates new, fictional sculptures from already ‘standardised’ reproductions, cannily shifting back and forth between three-and two-dimensionality and pushing photography’s illusionism one step further into the virtual.

In eight large-format black and white photographs, Etzensperger stages delirious variations on iconic sculptural topoi. In Clothing, he shows a headless figure submerged in a waterfall of folded fabric. Whereas in classic sculpture the arrangement of folds is a discreet sign of mastery, Etzensberger transforms it into an all-encompassing excessive swirl at odds with any classical ideal. The same happens to the limbs of lovers that resolve into a fleshy wheel turning upon itself. In Torso 1-3, classical torsos, epitomes of measured beauty, are cut up into strangely disfigured shapes that are reminiscent of Expressionism’s violent, fractured representations of the human body, while the edgily collaged fragments of the breastfeeding Virgin Mary seem to nod to Cubism. In Atlas and Stone, Etzensperger tackles the perennial question of the relationship between stone and sculpture. But whereas in a standard narrative the sculptor heroically masters the slab of stone, here its weight and materiality reasserts itself in Etzensperger’s collage, defeating the will to form. They expose sculpture as illusionary a medium as photography.

The illusionism of a sculpture’s photograph is always a second-degree experience that loses any vestiges of referentiality in Etzensperger’s collage. These questions also resurface in two mini-series, Nike and Discobolus. By partially cutting out several reproductions of the Nike of Samothrace and arranging them in a manner suggesting that the goddess is literally stepping of the page, Etzensperger refers to countless animated film scenes in which characters step off the stage set, thus cajoling the venerable Nike into a cartoon-like scenario. In Discobolus, Etzensperger approaches the question of reproduction from two angles. This relief of a disk thrower is considered one of two masterpieces by the ancient Greek sculptor Myron of Eleutherae, several copies of which are extant while the original has disappeared.

Before the invention of photography, sculpture was disseminated by means of copies, which were highly-sought after. The cult of the original enters rather late, further abetted by the rise of photography, which took over the function of the copy. In line with this, Etzensperger produced seven photographs of different copies of the disk thrower, which all conform to Wölfflin’s standards, yet are photographed from oblique perspectives and therefore suggest spatial movement as if to poke fun of the reproduction’s proper intent.

As a result, Normal Viewpoint, No Other Than The Direct Frontal View engages in both a dialogue with photography and art history, highlighting their points of intersection as first outlined in Wölfflin’s essay. It plays out sculpture’s simulcra against that of photography, creating a hall of mirrors where various means of reproductions reflect off each other. Yet by highlighting artifice, the original referent, the human body, comes back into focus. Since antiquity Western sculpture has defined our ideals of the body beautiful, which have frequently come under attack and reconsideration in various twentieth century art movements. Ultimately, Etzensperger uses photographic fragments of classical sculptures to create gently subversive counterparts, informed by modernism’s reframing of the human figure by way of fragmentation and distortion. Etzensperger superimposes the two contrasting approaches in his photographs and thus stimulates questions about this radical break in art history and, just as importantly, on the status of sculpture today. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist. © Michael Etzensperger (Installation View: Michael Etzensperger & Sarah Hablützel)

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Martin Jaeggi is a Swiss-based critic and curator. He is a lecturer in the Department of Art and Media at Zurich University of Arts.

Daido Moriyama

a room

Essay by Jean-Kenta Gauthier

Renown for his urgent, blurry photographs of street scenes, experimental approaches to printed matter and vast dissemination of images, Daido Moriyama has in effect been working on a room in his own apartment since the 1970s. These intimate, black and white photographs, with their strong erotic undertones, offer a glimpse into Moriyama’s daily life. Mixing depictions of female nudes — often pictured from angles in which the models’ faces are kept obscured — with shots of banal and ordinary domestic situations, this works suggests a voyeuristic approach in which the artist is simultaneously a participant and observer of his own intimate, private documentary. Asserting both a sense of control over the actions and containment in its rendering, a room represents the diary of an artist, now aged 77, who for over five decades has harnessed photography’s power to revive memories like no other.

On February 14-15, 2015, Daido Moriyama held a ‘printing show’ performance in Akio Nagasawa gallery in Tokyo, using the entire selection of 67 photographs included in a room. The event, during which 600 unique copies of a book of the same name were produced, marked the fourth recreation of Moriyama’s now famous book-making performance since the original underground exhibition from 1974. It was also the first time Moriyama would reorganise such an event in Tokyo, as the three other venues were located in the US (Aperture Foundation, New York 2011), the UK (Tate Modern, London, 2012) and France (Le Bal, Paris, 2013).

‘Printing show’, a term coined by Moriyama, puts the process of creating a photobook at the heart of the event. That week of March 1974, participants were asked to select a fixed number of his images from a grid displayed on a wall, determine their order and then have them printed on location using a photocopy machine before assembling and stapling their own unique copy together. Each would be signed and accompanied by a silkscreen cover and the book, entitled Another Country in New York, ushering in a brand of performance art applied to the creation of a photobook.

Daido Moriyama has confessed to me that his favourite book is Andy Warhol’s catalogue for his exhibition held in 1968 at Modern Museet in Stockholm. Less a traditional museum catalogue, this historical book conveyed Warhol’s aesthetics without heavy use of text. Made of a stream of black and white images with a colourful silkscreen cover showing Warhol’s famous flower motif, this publication shares many similarities, despite its size and pagination, with Moriyama’s 2015’s a room or the aforementioned Another Country in New York.

Daido Moriyama has also made appropriation, a core idea in Warhol’s oeuvre, a key concept in his work. Over the course of a long and prolific career, photographs of posters or television screens, i.e. images of images, have become legion. The work that is the most representative of this principle is probably Accident, a volume of 12 series published each month throughout 1969 in the Japanese magazine Asahi Camera. Each series, wonderfully titled Premeditated or not, consists of photographing magazine pages or television screens ranging from incidents such as car crashes to murder cases, and other instances of violence, unrest and depravation. The premise of a ‘printing show’ naturally extends the appropriation principle further by enabling not only the artist but the public to make Moriyama’s images their own. It closes the gap between author and audience, message and medium. One could also add that, as is the case with a room, Moriyama has reached his utmost level of de-appropriation by letting the participants appropriate and edit what can be considered as the artist’s most intense images of highly personal memories.

During his 2011 printing show at Aperture Foundation, one particular participant chose to repeat the same image throughout her copy, which was a surprise to Daido Moriyama who smiled wryly when he discovered the singular sequence. By transmitting images, the ‘printing show’ fits into the wider discussion on the nature of visual communication. Moriyama, himself, has said the following on the matter: “When I sign each book, I open the book and look at the image on the first page, and I think ‘aah… this person chose this image!’ I kind of see the person’s character and taste. I find it very interesting. To tell the truth, I would like to see every page of what everyone has selected. For example, even without seeing the person’s face or their daily life and work, I think there is a moment of communication with them through photography.”

Often referring to the idea of a photograph being a “fossil of light and time” that is updated or reanimated every time it is seen by a viewer, Moriyama has focused his attention on the moment when one of his single memories potentially encounter those belonging to the viewer. In this sense, his ‘printing shows’, given that they let the viewers recontextualise Moriyama’s memories in the most tangible way, ultimately consist in a form of confrontation with memories. They represent the most advanced formula of the artist’s intention, of which a room is the latest and most generous manifestation. Moriyama says it best: “A single photograph contains different images.” ♦

All images courtesy of the artist, Akio Nagasawa Gallery and Jean-Kenta Gauthier. © Daido Moriyama Foundation.

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Jean-Kenta Gauthier is the founder of a Paris-based contemporary art gallery. He has also partnered with Clément Kauter and Akio Nagasawa on Circulation, a new laboratory space dedicated to artists’ books, opening on 13 November with an inaugural show of Daisuke Yokota’s new work entitled Inversion.

Matthew Connors

Fire in Cairo

Book review by Max Houghton

The end is where we start from. This oft-quoted line from T.S. Eliot’s Little Giddings was an expression of philosophical, spiritual and, perhaps, aesthetic renewal after the horrors of the two world wars. It is also a deliberate conceptual strategy in the making of Fire in Cairo by Matthew Connors, a book which reads back-to-front. When many of us encounter a photo-book, this is how we flip through it, anyway. It’s a curious but pervasive quirk. Books in Arabic are ‘read backwards’ or, more accurately, they are read in the reverse direction to books in, for example, Germanic or Romance scripts. It is important, however, to note that language itself doesn’t have a direction.

Among Connors’ achievements with this work is that he has harnessed the energy of fire and revolution and used it as a charge for his own creativity, with this vivid green, cloth-covered book. It opens, at the ‘back’, with a short story which oscillates between sexual intimacy, the history of torture and the impossibility of knowledge, only to end in silence. This is our territory. He lands the reader in Midan Simon Bolivar, Cairo, a location which, like its eponymous hero, symbolises the people’s struggle and the possibility for change and freedom. During the heady days of 2011, when nearby Tahrir Square was the epicentre of the uprising to oust Mubarak, a bandage was placed over the eye of the Bolivar statue, after police had employed tear gas. As Pablo Neruda writes of Bolivar, “I wake every hundred years when the people are awake.” The story closes with its narrator detained, while the “bureaucracy of retribution” is adjudicated. As a description of what follows the fever and ferment of revolution, this chilling phrase conjures tedium, injustice and quiet threat of violence still to come.

We turn the page to a different kind of not-knowing: a portrait in black and white of an older man, in what I will lazily call traditional Arab dress. I cannot say if there is further significance to his attire – it may be clerical. Like the narrator, I am reminded constantly of my lack of knowledge. An extensive series of paired portraits follow this single image and, with a couple of disruptions, we are still seeing in black and white. Connors took two images of each person, seconds apart, and the editing process led to this effective juxtaposition, in which we can perceive subtle changes in light or expression. One pairing is of two different men – police not protestors – and is the exception that proves the rule. With this series, Connors invites the reader to question the nature of a photographic portrait, shown here to be always in flux. His doublings create a kind of binocular vision, without the illusion of depth.

These portraits begin a sustained meditation on sight and sightlessness, and speech and silence that courses through the work. The right eye of the first young man pictured is occluded. A few pages on, another young man sports a plaster on the delicate tissue just below his eye. Another man wears a scarf, creeping up to obscure his sight. A veiled woman has only a narrow aperture through which to see, curtailing her peripheral vision, as do the hoods of sportswear worn by others. A masked man’s eyes are open to the elements, his mouth a covered orifice. Then, on subsequent pages, fire ablaze in orange. Fire that seems to hang like a mushroom cloud in the sky, though the flames flare from tyres burning on the ground.

Next, another pairing is of a boy with an oversized sweatband concealing most of his eyes, as well as his nose and mouth. This seems to be the last doubling, as overleaf a vivid image of bright green laser lines engulfs the reader’s vision. This is the image on which the work turns. Now: riot police and tear gas trails. Then one final portrait pair (for now); this time in a full skull mask with upturned eye-socket slits, rendering the face underneath bug-like. Metamorphosis can indeed be a reasonable response to oppression. Questions of freedom of speech; the right to say what has been seen (another impossible task); the right to remain silent, hover over these faces, wary, vulnerable, fearless, hidden, exposed, altered.

During the uprisings – and since – thousands of people used laser pointers as an act of protest, shining their light at military helicopters in an attempt to knock them off course. In Fire in Cairo, the images they created in the night sky becomes a leitmotif, the most important in the book. They are images of protest, a union of technology and direct action, even, if we take the etymological light-writing definition, a new and potent photography.

Other images depict a city heading towards ruin — torn down posters, remnants of things destroyed by fire, shadows through trees, a young man clutching something that might detonate if thrown, a man bent double in apparent despair, military helicopters, birds in flight or fright. On seeing a found photograph of a bride, I am struck by the thought that it is in fact a lost photograph, unsutured from its family album. A graphic poster of a teenage girl has her face, especially her eyes, repeatedly and violently struck out. As the book draws to a close, a sinister portrait pairing reminds us of our compulsion to repeat. The figure is fully covered by a black garment, with a mirrored mask over the face, reflecting back a view of the contested landscape of the street. The revolution through masked and unseeing eyes. It is a mannequin, but such distinctions between real and unreal no longer make sense. The view thereafter is upwards. A sky redesigned by smoke and fire. Is that encroaching blood? Gathering darkness? New constellations have been created with green light, though we cannot be sure how long their luminescence will endure. They have, like pinned butterflies, been captured here. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist and Self Publish, Be Happy. © Matthew Connors

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Max Houghton writes about photographs for the international arts press, including FOAM, Photoworks and The Telegraph. She edited the photography biannual 8 Magazine for six years and is also Senior Lecturer in Photography at London College of Communication – University of the Arts, London.

Margot Wallard

Natten

Essay by Michael Grieve

Death is the night and the nocturnal space to which we all arrive. Margot Wallard’s photographic project Natten is a heartfelt response to, and an attempt to bridge, a massive chasm between the inner places of her emotional and psychological being. The sudden interruption of continuity was, for Wallard, caused by the experience of witnessing her brother’s slow and untimely death, an experience she described as a “violent process” for all concerned. In essence, in the wake of loss, Natten is a post-traumatic visual exploration and an attempt to reaffirm and claim life.

Wallard’s older brother had lost his way and had been an alcoholic for many years. In an attempt to come close to him, Wallard documented him and his partner, also an alcoholic and who died a year before Wallard’s brother. In the epilogue to the photobook that followed, titled My Brother Guillaume and Sonia, Wallard writes: “I find myself with these images and I feel overwhelmed by what has played out before me. There is no question of acceptance … [their] death is an unimaginable violence that plunged me into an abyss of sadness.” During this period, coinciding with her brother’s illness, Wallard found herself uprooted from her Parisian home to live in the natural splendour and open landscape of Värmland in Sweden with her lover. Constantly traversing Sweden and France during the critical time, enduring the disinfectant sterility of hospital, Wallard’s initial relationship to her new rural Swedish home was fragmented and ultimately disconnected.

After the experience of losing someone, the raw existence of life is existentially revealed. Life, for a time, can no longer be light but heavy as if a dark, thunderous cloud constantly hovers above. Nihilism becomes a serious challenge and you mourn not just the loss of a loved one but realise with a frightening intensity the fragile nature of life. On a rational basis, we understand that we will die, but until we are in close proximity and death seeps into our very soul we never really know. And so it takes tremendous courage to confront life head on during this difficult transition period where we learn not to drown in grief but swim up for air. With Natten, Wallard resuscitates her life via her creative process and, in a sense, resolves to reinvigorate and reinvent her identity by virtue of explorations into her immediate physical environment. Here, in the Swedish countryside, is a working development of the investigation into her relationship to this alien territory.

Natten has evolved into variants of representation ranging from the sensual to the forensic. The work contains a deep curiosity of touch, of renewed sensitivity, of a dialogue with reality. With a tactile examination during this pursuit, she tries to grasp from death the very essence of life. This sensibility combines with the quizzical tension of a furrowed forehead that asks with rational inquiry, ‘what is this?’ There are detailed examinations of insect life rendered on tracing paper. Snow and ice are removed out of context, placed on the scanner, melting all the while, and erupt into abstracted sculptural forms against blackness. What is close manifests into something cosmic and here our sense of perspective, recognition and distance are distorted as our spatial comprehension is confused.

Wallard further experiments with the scanned aesthetic by placing dead animals on the flat bed. There is something beautiful and brutal about this process as we see skeletal birds, the partially squashed hair of a mole, the head of young deer, and the almost bizarre red tongue of a squirrel protruding profanely from its mouth. There is something undignified in death, yet their lifeless forms are simultaneous here to our inquiry and admiration. The compressed feathers of an owl, its sideways profile and hooked nose is a macabre reminder of some figure from a Hieronymus Bosch painting. In terms of design, Natten is a rich compendium of ingredients that is reminiscent of eloquently illustrated Enlightenment-era encyclopaedias of Naturalis Historiae. Though, unlike the codified ideals of classification, her work subverts objectification in looking to subject the object to lyrical means. These are documentations though they go far to breathe meaning into an animal that no longer exists.

Though beautiful, the self-portrait nudes that punctuate the project cannot be accused of being fey or whimsical, as is often the case in female representations in nature. Indeed, the protagonist’s feminine presence does not entirely conform to the female natural form of an anthropomorphic oneness with the nature. Her body, set against the landscape of trees, grass and lakes, is often blurred as if to say she is present but that she is also absent. Wallard is not an earth-mother, she does not depict herself conforming to this romantic female stereotype, even though there is enough ambiguity in these nudes to cause a semblance of doubt, but what that doubt is cannot be, and should not be, understood. And, by a strange twist of fate, it is obvious that there is a startling new chapter in development to this Natten story.

This autobiography was inspired by the deep sadness of death, but in the nudes there is the scattered progression of pregnancy on Wallard’s body. There is a new life growing inside her. It is tempting to simplify this story with a thrilling conclusion that reads ‘from death is rebirth’. But such a cathartic end is disingenuous to the meaning of Natten. Rather, the work insists on the process, through her creative process, of the never ending cycle of life; that from not existing we are thrust into the world and then we die and no longer exist, and that the incomprehensible phenomenon of life keeps turning over. And, in between, we try to touch our existence, albeit, at times, from a distance. Natten is an admission of this, of the conflict between our awe and our impossibility to the fully embrace the mystery of our reality. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist. © Margot Wallard

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Michael Grieve is a photographer represented by Agence VU’. He also writes regularly for the British Journal of Photography and is creative director of the newly-formed Berlin Foto Kiez.

Matt Lipps

Library

Essay by Chris Littlewood

Starting in 1970, Life-Time magazine published images from their immense archive of mass-media and fine art photographs in a series titled Library of Photography. It was a 17-volume hardback edition delivered to people’s homes at a time when analogue SLR cameras were sweeping through America. After more than a century confined to exclusivity, across the country Polaroids were being pulled, family albums built. This was the moment when automatic photography became part of the mass consumer market. Demonstrative and diagrammatic, the Library of Photography began by showing depictions of darkroom equipment and cross-sections of camera bodies. From the instructional to the iconic, the series was illustrated with gravure reproductions of work by celebrated photographers, including Irving Penn and Bill Brandt. One volume was dedicated to some of the most recognised photojournalism of the time while chapters ranged from techniques to genres to the conservation of photographs, this was an all inclusive visual aide – everything you could possibly need to know about photography.

Matt Lipps is a California-based artist known for his astute examination of pre-digital photographic material. By way of dissecting, mounting, reassembling and lighting, Lipps’ ornamentation of found photographs delivers the images out of antiquity into a meaningful present. By bringing together the amateur with the professional, the procedural with the artistic, Lipps’ approach is nothing short of democratic. Together with overtly stylised coloured backdrops or lighting gels, the overall effect is at once retro and contemporary. They are hybrid images – visual seesaws between past and present – that places Lipps’ work within a critical mass of predominantly American artists engaging with a post-Photoshop, post-internet image culture.

“We live in a photographic mind-set, creating memories for the future,” Matt Lipps has said. And with it, Western society now carries a camera in its pocket. That an unprecedented number of photographs are being produced daily is not in doubt. We are visually saturated and photographically dependent. Increasingly people experience life through the lens of social media platforms, where digital photography becomes less a tool of candid documentation and more a constructed reality. We manufacture moments that look like photographs that will become memories we will treasure. Concurrently, ‘art photography’ is experiencing a surge in techniques that seek to dissolve observed reality with digitally generated imagery, studio assemblages and appropriated material with sculptural installations. ‘Constructed photography’ has become the term of the day.

In his essay from the current issue of frieze magazine, entitled Construction Sight Aaron Schuman places Matt Lipps alongside Daniel Gordon, Noemie Goudal, Chris Wiley, Hannah Whitaker, Lorenzo Vitturi, Sara Cwynar and Asger Carlsen as the frontrunners of this generation. Linked by their focus on photographic form over informational content, these artists utilise photography as both a technical endeavour and a physical medium. It is the “scaffolding of the photographic medium [that becomes} explicit and intricate”. Lorenzo Durantini writes of a similar group in his essay Tool Objects: “These artists allow us to witness the evacuation and fragmentation of the object and the emergence of the tool as the primary focus of this new hybrid practice” in an article from The British Journal of Photography in 2012. The same year Durantini curated Brush it in at Flowers Gallery. Taking its title from a colloquial expression associated with the act of digital manipulation using Adobe Photoshop, the group exhibition was an assembly of works – including photo-sculptures – that engaged with the pictorial tension between virtual editing and physical intervention. There have been a handful of exhibitions in this vein, notably Foam Museum’s Under Construction – New Positions in American Photography.

It is easy to see why the photographic convention of studio-based still life has been adopted by many of these artists. It has long been associated with a heightened sense of looking and perceiving. It is also deployed as the primary language in the advertising world’s relentless campaign to sell goods. As Durantini states: “The inevitable disappointment of mass-produced commodities has created a sort of haptic half-life where the image produces more pleasure than the object itself.” This has created a fertile borderland between representation and experience, where artists are able to explore and enact revenge. No longer relevant as a genre in its own right, the devices associated with still life have all but been consumed by ‘constructed photography’. In many ways the role of the early travelling photographer helped to free artists from the confines of the studio. Now it seems the reverse is true. The studio practitioner is now freed through their ability to exert full creative control, to roam across modes of practice with seemingly little regard for tradition.

Alongside still life, there has been much talk about appropriation in a critical sense. It’s possible that Matt Lipps and others represent a kind of optimistic appropriation where the artist is partly naive. The word ‘curator’ has now become a ubiquitous term synonymous with anyone able to edit, sequence and share images. Blogs along with websites like Instagram and Pinterest enable users to not only produce unique content, but to intersperse it with existing and often anonymous material. It comes as little surprise that artists too are drawn towards this curatorial impulse.

Operating as individual case-histories, Matt Lipps’ Library presents us with the artist’s edits as single pictorial planes; an overview of what a particular area of photography might show if viewed all at once. Playful yet unnerving, bizarre juxtapositions of subjects and scale jolt the viewer out of a traditional reading. Images are blended together in such a way that their individual histories and scale are not important. By freeing images from a rigid and linear context, Lipps’ grid-like compositions display content more akin to a Google image search. By referencing the layout of bookshelves, the viewer oscillates between the dimensions of screen-based and print-based media.

Library comprises of 17 works based on each of the original Time-Life volumes. Lipps begins by cutting out images and staging them like theatre props on glass shelves. Likened to cabinets of curiosities, the tableaux also resemble fossil samples in their pseudo-scientific means of display. Lipps creates static scenes for the camera, fabricated in order to be photographed from a specific angle, with specific lighting at a specific time. Through striking economy, Lipps breathes life into each cast of the outsized characters and oddities. Polarised with seductive colours, the backdrops are scans made from the artist’s own archive of early 35mm negatives. Although Lipps himself did not learn photography from the Time-Life publications, he was educated in a similar manner. Ignoring the advice he now offers students, Lipps goes about breaking every unwritten rule of Photoshop – deliberately oversaturating and applying gimmicky filters. By combining the personal with the canonised, the compositional unity conjures an objecthood that is wholly surreal. Library contains shapes that the viewer apprehends, but cannot necessarily perceive in his/her spatial environment.

When photography replaced painting as the instrument of factual representation, it allowed painting to go through a process of self-exploration where formal qualities such as composition or colour became subjects worthy of artistic endeavour alone. As computer generated imagery replaces photography, perhaps the medium of photography is also experiencing a similar process of introspection. In the work Photographers, 2013 doors open to unknown places, chains, artefacts and memento mori cover an obscured self-portrait of Lipps. A reflection of the artist’s camera stares back and suddenly the observer becomes the observed. Superimposed in the centre sits Salvador Dali’s In Voluptas Mors, a form which blends beauty with death. Six female nudes are materialised as a pair of hollow eyes, jagged teeth and a skull. A giant cyan hand emerges from behind the trophy cabinet of moribund misfits as if to wave them off to an impending doom. Part Requiem to an analogue craft, part evolution, Matt Lipps’ Library may come to represent a key moment in photography’s new found formalism. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist. © Matt Lipps

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Chris Littlewood is a curator and writer based in London, who currently works as the Photography Director at Flowers Gallery. The programme at Flowers has included exhibitions by represented photographers Boomoon, Edward Burtynsky, Nadav Kander, Mona Kuhn, Robert Polidori, Simon Roberts and Michael Wolf.

Thomas Demand

New Photographs

Essay by Duncan Wooldridge

Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles
24.01.15 — 04.04.15

In the beginning was the model. And the model demonstrated that the idea worked, at least on paper. And what began on paper, was in turn mediated by it, and has returned to it, becomes it. In most accounts of his work to date, we have known Thomas Demand for his paper sculpture, and what we might also think of as his constructed, or staged photography of these objects. We are familiar with their laborious production, their 1:1 scale, and their origins in pre-existing photographs. Such contexts inspire a wonderment – upon the first viewing of Demand’s project we are drawn to its labour and spectacle, and perhaps justly so. But for those who return, what of the strange balance of familiarity and the novel? Is a different set of longer lasting questions at work?

It is strange that we might account for the role of paper in the work of Thomas Demand, and not that of the model. Apparent in Demand’s most recently completed work, in his exhibition at Matthew Marks in Los Angeles, is the evolving status of this very object. The philosopher Vilém Flusser wrote, in a lecture to L’Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, in Arles, France, that photographs were models. He stated: “The true photographer intends to make pictures which may be used as models for the experience, the knowledge, and the evaluation of their receivers.”

The photographer, for Flusser, did not simply accept the apparent ‘realism’ of the image, but actively constructed it. For Demand, the model is a unifying theme, which brings together the artist’s method and subject matter. He is at once the maker of physical models, and the surveyor of photographs as models of meaning and information.

On the one hand, a model might be retrospective: it is an historical image existing as a blueprint. It functions as a marker or trace, the flicker of an event whose significance is only now becoming fully apparent – in Atelier, the brightly lit studio of Henri Matisse is represented at a late and overlooked stage of the artist’s career, at the moment of his cut-outs. Coloured paper is strewn on the floor, as if we were witnessing the moment after they were formed from their paper – just as they were made, and about to go out in to the world. More than simply a product of the artist’s age and ill health, which usually attempts to explain his move from painting, the cut-outs suggested a different strategy of art-making, made of paper and scissors, rather than brushes and paints. They point to reinvention, and the quick joy of assemblage over the slow process of painterly construction. In Demand’s hands they seem to return us back to one of the artist’s core obsessions: paper as material. Paper is both the material of proposition and the tool of historical record.

If Demand often portrays scenes from the past, so too are recent events made visible. Backyard represents the side steps up to the house of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the suspects of the Boston Marathon bombings that took place in 2013. It is a work reminiscent of many of Demand’s accounts of recent history, presenting banal or familiar spaces – kitchens, homes, bars and gardens – loaded with the weight of the events that haunt them. This image of Tsarnaev’s home presents the vernacular wooden architecture of the Boston suburbs. The proximity of each house to the next suggests both density and community, but also sets a stage for a certain honest or straightforward living. Such an idyll is disrupted by objects strewn across the little patch of grass. These signifiers, in a culture in which one’s garden is often manicured to maintain the social contract, allows the portrayal of Tsarnaev to quickly form his status as an outsider.

It is worth noting Demand’s taste for criminals and their stories, not so much for the language of the crime scene photograph – as has so often been remarked upon – but for their subjects’ clearly defined and quickly formed place in our historical consciousness, as evil, unimaginable, other. Tsarnaev was crafted as a kind of model, or anti-model. Not interrogated for motive so much as simply represented to the public, he is held up as the very antithesis of reason, of sense. Caught in a context in which his immigrant status prefaces his brutal acts, Tsarnaev is suspended in history as an abstraction, as are many of Demand’s villains.

Thinking historiographically – rather than historically – permits a view of history subject to alteration, to the will of its authors, and to its casting and re-casting. Demand’s reconstruction of Matisse’s studio is similarly appropriate. It falls at the time of a re-evaluation of the artist’s collage in exhibitions at Tate and MoMA. At the very moment the viewer comes face to face with the notion of Matisse as a master collagist, history is recast, recomposed. Matisse himself becomes a model – an object of study, and a means of projecting into the future.

Usually, we think of the model as a forecast, as a form of pre-visualisation. A sleight of hand, which turns photography from an object obsessed with the past, into one concerned with the potentiality of the future, Demand began in 2011 to photograph the architectural models of John Lautner. The rough, scuffed and annotated cardboard structures in Model Studies showed the anticipation of an architecture yet to be built (of course, some of an architects’ models are realised, whilst many are not). Demand’s new photographs show working models by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of celebrated Japanese architects SANAA. Shaped and crumpled, and cut out by hand, what emerges are overlapping, opening and compressing volumes. Cleaner than Lautner’s models, they produce an architecture as space, and envisage the model as a vision of a built environment yet to come. They are as real as images of space as are photographs of architecture itself, for Demand is something of a realist, despite or perhaps because of, his paper constructions.

And so what is the status of the model after Demand’s treatment? It might be clear that – beyond our initial wonderment – the model is something that is made, crafted and forged, though it is not simple labour. The model is history written and brought into being. It is not a passive object, but a process of shaping: hence Demand’s distinctive matching of the model as process and subject of enquiry. Realism is the model that we opt to manifest. ♦

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Duncan Wooldridge is an artist, writer and curator. He is also course director of the BA(Hons) Photography at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.

Dominic Hawgood

Under the Influence

Essay by Lucy Soutter

As I write this, a portion of Dominic Hawgood’s project Under the Influence is on display at TJ Boulting gallery in London’s West End. The gallery space has been re-floored and re-skinned as a spotless white set for a show that is as much a light installation as a photography exhibition. In this series the photographer uses the whole toolbox of advertising photography, including lighting, digital image manipulation and CGI. He tests the limits of image-making to depict the limits of human experience. These images are drawn from scenes the photographer witnessed in Pentecostal churches in London, as mediated through the ways exorcisms and healings are documented and disseminated by the churches themselves.

If you just walked in off the street, the experience would be intense but possibly bewildering. The images oscillate between the visual rhetoric of photographic realism and the contrived seduction of advertising photography. They depict a world of sensation in which frozen hands grip, reach and claw, a world of high detail in which chipped nail polish, the down on a girl’s cheek or the texture of institutional carpet provide forensic clues to a mystery that lies somewhere out of frame. With titles for individual images such as, I Command You Get Out, and Rise Up You Are Free, this is the vocabulary and material culture of deliverance: crutches thrown aside, microphones thrust forward, and redemption conferred by the squirt of a spray bottle.

The experience of the work extends beyond this content to the atmosphere produced in room. Lit from below by the slightly headachy blue glow of hidden LED lights, the five black and white vinyl images of figures appear both to recede into the wall and to float a few millimetres away from it. The matte vinyls are punctuated by two extraordinarily slick objects – sculptural light boxes propped on the floor like a pair of giant iPads. These cast coloured halos into the room and also glow eerily from behind. The overall effect is of slight disorientation. These photographs do not behave as they should. It is as if disembodied screen images have taken on unstable new forms to meet us in the space of the gallery.

Only parts of Under the Influence can be seen in this installation. As with many contemporary projects, the work exists across several platforms, which may be considered in relation to one another for a fuller picture without necessarily looking to the photographer for an explanation. On the artist’s website vivid text by writer Pascale Cumming-Benson describes what actually happens in the church services – extreme bodily experience is looped through microphones, screens and speakers. At one point, “A woman runs to the front and casts herself down on the floor. She vomits and spits into the tissues placed in front of her. Another runs forward. Stretched out on the floor, they are surrounded by the ministers and cameramen.” Interspersed with the website’s text and images are hypnotic black and white video clips, YouTube extracts posted by the churches reconfigured by the artist into elegant vertical rectangles, unfocused and slowed-down. Too vague to act as documentary evidence (it would not be possible to identify a particular person or activity), they offer a strangely distanced view of physical and spiritual fervour.

Under the Influence also exists as a high-resolution three-dimensional architectural render. In this format Hawgood develops an interactive walk-through of how the specially lit images and videos would be look in an impossibly ideal environment, without the constraints of money, labour or architecture. The current installation was developed to approximate this render as closely as possible. The artist’s own photographic documentation of the live exhibition provides another level of feedback on this loop of virtual and actual.

In Under the Influence, as in previous projects, Hawgood has photographed subjects with first-hand experience of the phenomena depicted, but he does not tell us how or why. Reconstructing events from the world, Hawgood might recall Jeff Wall or Philip-Lorca diCorcia, but I think more appropriate reference points would be Ed Atkins or James Bridle (the latter currently showing nearby at The Photographer’s Gallery). Like Atkins in works like Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths (2013), Hawgood plays on our visceral reaction to the intersection point of flesh and pixels. Both artists use digitally heightened, impossible images to explore what remains of our stone age physicality: the brute sensations and inchoate longings that make us feel real. Like Bridle, whose recent work Seamless Transitions provides a CGI fly-through of forbidden spaces of the UK immigration and asylum system, Hawgood’s work also considers the politics of imaging, how we participate in the surveillance of our own existence, and how that documentation helps to shape our reality. Hawgood also cites as influences Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, and Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 film The Act of Killing, both works that include painstaking recreations of traumatic events. In an era of simulacra a consciously fictive reenactment may get closer to the truth of an event than more traditional forms of documentation.

A decade ago, narrative photography was all about the tableau, the grand staged scenes that Julian Stallabrass dubbed ‘museum pictures’ for their grandiosity and historical aspiration. For writers like Jean-François Chevrier and Michael Fried, the tableau needs to be self-contained, a world unto itself, into which we can project our thoughts without being caught up in any external trappings of theatricality. Hawgood’s use of lighting and installation, external text, supplementary video and virtual documentation openly flaunts this model of picture-making. In his hands photography provides less a totalising vision than a contingent, complicit mode of exploration. This is less a ‘model of experience’ (Chevrier’s claim for pictorial photography) than a quest for experience, using various forms of unreliable imaging to re-activate the jaded viewer’s imagination. ♦

—
Lucy Soutter is an artist, critic and art historian. She is senior tutor in the Department of Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art, London, and is the author of Why Art Photography? (London: Routledge Press, 2013).

Nobuyoshi Araki

Marvelous Tales of Black Ink

Special book review by Ivan Vartanian

One of Nobuyoshi Araki’s many wizard-like tricks is his ability to usher in the feeling that there is more than meets the eye. His photography seems to lean towards the grand and epic. Even is his most tender of moments – photographing his dying, beloved cat or taking snapshots of his newly wedded bride, Yoko, on their honeymoon trip – he seems to be able to connect to something that is on a cosmic order of magnitude. While this may indeed be the case on the level of content, I also know Araki to be an irrepressible and consummate showman. Little is left to chance in the scenarios and scenes that he builds for his images since he operates like a stage manager, directing all components on and off it. In a sense, Araki’s images are constructions in which each tier (including his crew, the lighting, and, of course, the model) is manipulated like marionettes. So when approaching a book such as Marvelous Tales of Black Ink, published by Morel Books, we cannot underestimate Araki’s level of clever play (read: calculation).

Each image in the book is illustrated with character forms written in brush pen. For a western audience, an already alien written system is made all the more difficult to decipher. This doesn’t mean Araki isn’t mindful of his audience; it’s just the opposite. He is fully aware that his readership won’t be able to make sense of the brushwork beyond an appreciation for its graphic effect. The calligraphy is a puzzle for which there may or may not be an answer. But being plainly read isn’t the point. Rather, what he is doing here is presenting a series of riddles and he asks the reader to step into that unknowable terrain without expectations of answers. The gesture here is one of pointing, not explaining.

Even being able to read Japanese, several of the writings in this book left me scratching my head. I had to do some research to parse some of his wordplays. Take, for example, the book’s title, which uses Chinese characters that are not part of everyday usage. The title is a direct reference to a novel by Kafu Nagai (1879-1959) written in 1937, called 濹東綺譚. The story is set in pre-war Japan and is about a retired novelist who has a brief love affair with a prostitute. It’s widely believed that the novel’s protagonist is a representation of the author. For the title of this photobook Araki has made one modification to the original: he’s replaced the second character entirely, changing it from 東 (east in English) to 汁 (liquid or juice). Perhaps this is meant emphasise the liquid nature of his brushwork’s India ink, which is what the title’s first character means.

Araki’s wordplay has been a consistent presence throughout his career. Apart from the copious volume of images that he continues to produce, Araki has also written a tremendous amount. In fact, in the late-1990s, a multiple-volume compendium of his writings was published that canvassed the extent of his essays, diaries, and other texts that are difficult to categorise. His sensitivity to language is perhaps also matched only by his irreverence for it. For every measure of aesthete musings, there is an equal measure of crass humour. He has often refered to his camera as a ca-mara. Mara is Japanese slang for penis; a more faithful translation would be “dick.” He is not only equating the camera with a phallus but also conflating the two words and the two ideas – a central tenant of Araki’s thoughts on photography.

Conflation of two forms into one is a running visual and thematic trope throughout Araki’s oeuvre. This trope is also a form of nodding to some other existing form or body of work. In terms of traditional Japanese aesthetics, this is called mitateru. The English word allusion approaches this idea to a certain degree. Where allusion calls to mind an existing work, mitateru borrows the referenced form en masse with some modification. As Araki has done with the title, he has borrowed from the novelist Nagai, the “original” (in Western parlance) is presented simultaneously as its revised form. This is less an act of plagiarism and more a play of forms, by calling to mind and asserting the presence of both the original and its revised version at the same time. In this instance, Araki is presenting himself as both the novelist Nagai and the fiction’s protagonist.

While the calligraphy was ostensibly all done at one time, the images are pulled from the photographer’s vast archive of images. The bondage images were a regular theme in Araki’s work in the 1990s. Suspending a nude from the ceiling and contorting the model in such an elevation requires is a highly sophisticated rope technique. Ensuring the safety and relative comfort of the model means that each of these shoots requires an elaborate staging production. Moreover, this floating technique seems to make use of a decidedly traditional Japanese space configuration (madori); the ropes are attached to exposed beams, which are typically found in a tatami room. An extension of this scenario is the kimono that the women wear, or in many cases don’t wear. The space and the vestments and the network of finely organised cords all point to a particular aestheticism. Araki is drawing our awareness to not only the content of what’s written but also our own processes of how we read those signifiers. Within this schema, the female form as an object of voyeuristic sexual desire is complicated, as evinced by Simon Baker’s afterword to the book, which references Georges Bataille in his discussion of the flowers images included in this volume. As such, the literary superstructure reinforces the complexity of how we are to read this book and the photographer’s base instincts are mitigated by the sophistication of the overall structure that he’s set into motion. Then again, maybe the joke’s on us. Personally, I’ve never known Araki to not mention his mara in nearly every conversation.

The book is a handsome production. The jacket of this oversized book feels like starched linen and the motif is raised. The choice of materials is refined and the printing, while simple, is done well. The coat of varnish on the plates is greatly appreciated. ♦

—
Ivan Vartanian is an American writer, curator, and publisher based in Tokyo. He is the co-author of Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s & 70s (Aperture, 2009) and Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers (Aperture, 2006), ArtWork: Seeing Inside the Creative Process (Chronicle Books, 2011), See/Saw: Connections Between Japanese Art Then & Now (Chronicle Books, 2011), and editor/producer of Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolors (Thames & Hudson, 2003). Vartanian also founded GOLIGA Books.

Ken Schles

Invisible City/Night Walk

Interview by Peggy Sue Amison

Invisible City was a cult book. After publication in 1988 it very quickly went underground and out of print. The New York Times selected it as a notable book of the year, and after that, it was gone. At the time, some critics rejected the format as too small while traditionalists described my use of bleeds as “anti-photography”. Peter Galassi eventually included Invisible City in an exhibit at the MoMA, but even by then it was already out of print for several years. The book was expensive to own; difficult to find: it was disappearing onto the shelves of collectors.

When the Internet came around Invisible City didn’t have much presence. While known in the photographic community, its unavailability only added to its cult status, something I felt was problematic. It started appearing in volumes on the history of the photobook (or not, which was then hotly debated online). Prices skyrocketed. While valuation for many years hovered around $800 a copy, suddenly it reached $1.2k to $2k a copy. Once I saw Invisible City listed as high as $10,000.

Sitting in his office, Phil Block (one of the founders of ICP and I were talking about how Invisible City, while appreciated by a certain audience, was becoming forgotten to a new generation. I decided it would be nice to make a 25th anniversary reprint, still some five years off. Jack Woody, the original publisher at Twelvetrees Press, wasn’t as keen on a reprint, because the technology for printing in photogravure (the original printing method used) had become obsolete. Much of the beauty and object quality of Invisible City came from this particular process, and this was something neither of us wanted to lose.

Then, in 2011, within a few short months, a multiplicity of events conspired to set the stage for a reprint. These events also compelled me to examine other work from that same period. In the UK, at the University of Coventry, the online group Phonar selected Invisible City as a ‘best’ narrative photobook. Matt Johnston, who helped form the Phonar group, told me he had been developing a personal project through something he called The Photobook Club – an online crowd sourced study of iconic photobooks, in an attempt to bring those projects to a new audience. And – he would enjoy my participation. Independently, Howard Greenberg showed the book to Gerhard Steidl. Howard knew that Steidl had developed a new printing methodology that brought back certain qualities of photogravure and that Gerhard had been interested in reprinting select older titles. He thought Invisible City might be of interest to Gerhard. And Harper Levine, of Harper Books, asked me to make a new piece related to Invisible City for him to display at Paris Photo. Also Jason Eskenazi, approached me to exhibit Invisible City at a photo festival in Bursa, Turkey. Prior to these events I hadn’t considered the work in fifteen years.

There was a shift. A threshold had been crossed. New York City was a radically different place than it had been in my photographs. My work was now connected to a mythologised vision of a pre-gentrified, pre-Internet New York. And photography itself had changed: the way we looked at and shared images had shifted. I think both of these elements conspired to connect the work to another era and sparked new outside interest.

Night Walk grew initially from revisiting some outtakes Invisible City for purposes of discussion. I eventually mined my archives developing these new projects around Invisible City. Gerhard Steidl offered carte blanche for the reprint: I could change the format or add images, as he had done with Kouldelka’s Gypsies or Davidson’s Subway. But I felt strongly that thirty years on I shouldn’t mess with my early editorial decisions for they had become part and parcel of the book’s legacy. I wanted people to see Invisible City in its original form. I played with the Night Walk piece I made for Harper. I continued thinking what might accompany Invisible City’s re-release. Then a galvanising event came with the death of my parents.

My parents died within a day of each other in 2012. In my process of mourning, I thought about the many deaths of people I once knew, especially around the AIDS and drug crises in my early 20s, in the mid-1980s, and the death of my brother around the time Invisible City was published. My parents had been in a long decline for many years, both afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease, which I explored in my book, Oculus. My exploration of the connection between images and memory, in part, was a reaction to their senility. I looked at old contact sheets from my East Village days and remembered all those people who died. I remembered their presence so well. In my mind I could still vividly hear the their voices. And I was struck with the vitality of the people in my images. In a box of Invisible City material, I found a poem by Octavio Paz, called Night Walk. It resonated for me. I became obsessed with making my own ‘night walk.’ What began at first as an exercise now became an obsession: and then a book.

These two books, Invisible City and Night Walk are testaments to both the times they discuss and the times in which they were made. In one sense they are bookends. One made at the time, the other looking back. Invisible City came about when so many cultural phenomena overlapped and existed, for just a brief moment, in one place. I wanted to capture my sense of it before it all went away.

I believe the power of Night Walk comes from me experiencing death and reflecting upon past deaths while looking to these images, these fragments from the past, as totems of death’s opposite. Night Walk is about vitality and ephemerality, things that transcend the book’s focus of time and place. I wrote the following epigraph specifically to address these issues and to focus the reader’s attention on what is to come:

“I lay these fragments before you. What has since been rebuilt now reverts back to its former state of skeletal ruin. The dead reappear, hurry about and whisper their siren songs into your ear. Where once the journey was open-ended and uncertain, it now leads to an inevitable end. The living recognize in the past only what the living choose to remember or refuse to forget. In truth the past never reveals itself so readily or so fully — for even the dead once lived lives of complication and consequence, immeasurably filled with uncertainty and promise.”

For me the significance of the book is not that the book is set in some past, but that it resonates with a presence and vitality that I experience in the present. This is why I ended the book with the quote from T.S. Eliot on the paradox of experience being both absolute yet subjective and why I dedicated the book to the “memory of those who died in the scourge of AIDS and violence that gripped the East Village during the 1980s.”

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Ken Schles is an American photographer who has authored five monographs: Invisible City (Twelvetrees Press, 1988; reprint Steidl Verlag, 2014); The Geometry of Innocence (Hatje Cantz, 2001); A New History of Photography: The World Outside and the Pictures In Our Heads (White Press, 2007); Oculus (Noorderlicht, 2011) and Night Walk (Steidl Verlag, 2014). His work is also held in more than 100 museum and library collections throughout the world. Forthcoming exhibitions include Invisible City/Night Walk 1983—1989 at Noorderlicht Gallery from 4 April — 7 June 2015.