Category: Issue

Silvia Rosi

Disintegrata

Exhibition review by Mariacarla Molè

Silvia Rosi’s exhibition at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia showcases 34 artworks across four rooms, unified by the theme of vanishing identity and fractured representation. The collection features photographs from families of African descent in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy that portray the vitality and resilience of the diaspora community. Through her art Rosi serves as a conduit to this history as she connects to the story contained in her family album, reports Mariacarla Molè.

Mariacarla Molè | Exhibition review | 20 June 2024

As a viewer of Silvia Rosi’s Disintegrata at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, you become aware of the urge to piece together parts of a whole. The 34 artworks displayed in the four rooms appear to tell four distinct stories, yet they all share a common concept: the disappearance of a clear-cut representation of identity, which in turn becomes disintegrated, as implied by the title. Consequently, the exhibition presents photographic and video works that, despite being united by the word ‘disintegrata’, have a strong fragmented quality that is dispersed throughout the four rooms.

At first glance, the landscape photos in the initial room may leave you feeling disoriented, since the overall exhibition is billed as a project featuring archival photographs of the African diaspora in Italy, which the artist collected between 2023 and 2024. In fact, the first room is predominantly filled with black and white as well as coloured landscape photos, alongside videos, all from the series titled Disintegrata nel Paesaggio. These works mostly consist of images of Rosi’s figure crossing deserted green landscapes from the edge of time. The green colours are vibrant in the giclee prints, while the videos remain silent. In this scenario, the human figure seems unable to assert itself on the landscape; it can only pass through it. However, even when the human figure is caught posing, it appears to blend into the landscape: in one image, a figure with their back turned stands against a grassy landscape, and the texture of their coat merges with that of the grass. In another image, Rosi lies on the grass in the same coat, seemingly completely engulfed by it.

The desire to explore the landscape is new in Silvia Rosi’s practice and can be traced back to the theme of Fotografia Europea 2024, of which Disintegrata is a part: La natura ama nascondersi (Nature loves to hide), quoting Heraclitus, which assembles a series of solo and group exhibitions that thematise the sense of interdependence of every life form on Earth as part of a larger living organism. Some other elements resonate with those familiar with Rosi’s work, such as the tension of removing disturbing elements from the background, the coexistence of colour and black-and-white and her own presence, even if it is particularly elusive here, as if to underline the frustration towards self-portraiture and self-representation which becomes more and more slippery. Perhaps a clue to the direction her work is taking?

In the second room, it is easier to recognise Rosi’s work as it can be traced back to her analogue studio portraiture, which she then digitises, not to mention the clearly visible self-timer cable which is another characteristic element of her self-portraiture. The images constructed in the studio make use of single-colour drapes or essential decorations with geometric black-and-white patterns on the floor, such as checkered rhombuses and dots, and elegant outfits. In one image, Rosi shows off a wedding dress, in another a wig, and in another an elegant trouser suit. These are all meant to demonstrate adherence to specific historical periods – the first: the 1990s when her parents moved from Togo to Italy, and the second: studio portrait photography of 60s post-colonial West Africa. The environment of each image is bare, inhabited only by Rosi and individual objects such as a bike, a wedding dress, bedside tables loaded with framed family photos, an old hairdresser’s helmet and two old suitcases. All of these elements were extracted from Rosi’s family album to be reactivated with a stage-like quality. Reading the captions pays off as each self-portrait is a version of her ‘disintegrated’ presence. When translated, the titles read ‘Disintegrated with Family Photos’, ‘Italian Bride Disintegrated’ and ‘Disintegrated in Profile’, which represent splinters of possible worlds. Her figure, although omnipresent, seems to want to escape from the camera, often with her back turned or her face hidden behind objects like a flower, a shoulder, a helmet or a pack of Agfa photographic paper. The reference to Malick Sidibé’s photography is clear. However, unlike the photographer who used objects to reveal the pride of his portrayed subjects, Rosi uses them as a portal through which to connect to the story contained in her family archive. This allows her to pose in her parents’ clothes, so as to discover the history of her family, starting from the photographs in her album, through her body and the history of the diaspora, which was kept silent for a long time. She only experienced the aftermath of this history.

The interest in family albums is reignited in a collection of photographs from the 90s that Rosi, along with a team of researchers, gathered from families of African descent in the Emilia Romagna area, where she hails from. Palpable is the desire to create a disintegrated archive in a national territory that comes together via an openness to share and donate personal images. As someone who grew up in the early 90s, these poses and scenarios are very familiar: scenes of trips out of town, standing and posing in front of a landscape, in the centre of a square, or leaning against a car. Moments of celebration or simple daily life. The vitality is feverish, and they seem to say: “We are here and we are fine.” From the collection of work that Rosi amassed with the researchers, it emerged that these photos were often sent to relatives in Africa, accompanied by audio cassettes in which they recounted their stories. And this element seems to spill over into the video housed in the last room, where a three-part split screen shows a tape recorder on one side, with Rosi listening to the recorded voice through the headphones on the opposite side, while in the middle, the voice transcription of four different letters written between 1982 and 2000, read by the people who received them, telling stories of diaspora. You can sense their discomfort in speaking French, since it is not their first language. As a result, the communication might not be very fluent, but it is always sincere. They express gratitude, poverty, determination and worry. At this point, you feel conscious of being invited to assemble pieces, like an interpreter in photographs and a listener in videos, as Rosi seems to be doing to the world around her. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Collezione Maramotti. © Silvia Rosi

Disintegrata runs at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, until 28 July.

—
Mariacarla Molè is an art writer based in Turin.

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• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous R. Dahmani.

Carmen Winant

The Last Safe Abortion

Book review by Gem Fletcher

Carmen Winant works to counter the ways anti-abortion movements and the far right have made punishing attempts to control and dominate women’s bodies and reproductive rights. The Last Safe Abortion, published by SPBH Editions and MACK, focuses on the near 50-year period in which abortion was legal in the US (1973–2022), and presents a selection of photographs that employ Winant’s signature strategies of proximity and volume with radical effect, Gem Fletcher writes.

Gem Fletcher | Book review | 6 June 2024

On 30 April 1965, Lennart Nilsson’s portrait of an 18-week-old human foetus appeared on the cover of Life Magazine in a story called “Drama of Life Before Birth”. Over 18 pages, the Swedish photographer, often credited as the first person to photograph embryos, presented a sequence of foetuses at various stages of development, floating in a constellation of amniotic fluid. The actual drama of this ‘unprecedented feat’ in photography was that Nilsson’s images were operating under the pretence that the foetuses were alive when, in fact, they were not. His foetal pictures, posed and backlit, were only made possible because the pregnancies had been terminated to save women’s lives. 

This irony is lost on the anti-abortion movement who, since the 1980s, has weaponised Nilsson’s photographs in our cultural imagination – not as feats of science as he intended, but as visual propaganda – pushing a fiction that embryos are autonomous entities, independent from the birthing bodies that made them. What is missing from both Nilsson’s images – the mothers likely never gave their permission for their lost children to be imaged or reproduced – and the visual tactics of the far right is care. In their punishing attempts to control and dominate, there is no care for ethics, no care for the truth, and most pertinently, no care for women.

It’s this visually inculcated misinformation campaign that Carmen Winant sought to interrogate in her new title, The Last Safe Abortion, published by SPBH Editions and MACK. Focusing on the near 50-year period in which abortion was legal in the US (1973–2022), the book presents care as an agent of change, told through the advocacy and community building of abortion providers across the American Midwest. Building upon similar strategies in her previous books, My Birth (2018), Notes on Fundamental Joy (2019) and A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures (2022), Winant intends to fill a void in our visual lexicon whilst inviting the viewer to think about how pictures can function, not as documents, but as tools for social change.

Winant is an artist who has had a stake in the fight for reproductive justice long before the overturning of Roe. As a teenager, she volunteered as a clinic escort, started a pro-choice club in high school and was an active agent in advocacy work in Philadelphia. Returning to the subject in her practice, the challenge was if and how she could transmute these political commitments into art-making. What did the intersection of photography and abortion care look like? And what potential could looking yield?

The project started slowly in Cleveland after Winant made the two-hour drive from her home in Ohio to Pre-Term, one of the longest abortion care providers in the state. Upon arrival, she discovered the clinic’s archive of photographs, slides and negatives living in banker boxes, piled high in cupboards and stacked on shelves. The images – many of which had gone undisturbed for decades – show clinic staff sterilising medical equipment, answering phones, re-enacting procedures and attending fundraising events. These women harnessed image-making as an educational tool to demystify reproductive health and put patients at ease with no step deemed too small or unworthy to photograph. After Pre-Term, the work began to expand as Winant interacted with dozens of personal, organisational and institutional archives across the Midwest, many of which she visited multiple times, building relationships with staff and tracing their histories. Between 2019 and 2023, she scanned and collected thousands of 4×6 images, each playing an incremental role in the struggle. In addition, for the first time in decades, Winant made pictures herself, determined that the inventory of care she was collating reflected the contemporary moment, as clinics fight to survive and serve their communities post-Roe. 

As an object, The Last Safe Abortion feels more akin to a family album than a typical photobook: spiral bound, softback and accessible. Images are mounted on bright coloured hues mimicking the vibrancy of community notice boards and the librarian’s preferred process of archival scanning. Whilst the material quality of the book is simple and pared back, proximity and volume – Winant’s signature strategies – are employed with radical effect. Over an abundant 170 pages, we experience an uninterrupted flow of this visual material, only sporadically breaking pace to present multiple frames of the same moment to slow the viewer down and encourage them to linger. The result is a disarming and profound encounter with care and solidarity en masse – a powerful antidote to the endless violence that dominates our visual lexicon. 

What does care look like? It’s a difficult question to answer because we feel it more than we see it, and care work is quiet and incremental. In the context of the abortion care work, care happens behind closed doors, in waiting rooms, on the phone, around the bed in the operating theatre and in the recovery room. It is remarkably undramatic and visually mundane, yet both life-changing and life-saving. This dissonance gives the project its potency, not just within its context of the women who have dedicated their lives to the work of reproductive justice but as a critical probing of photography and its values.

Unlike photography’s tradition of one revered author, the visuality of this work is the sum of many people, including but not limited to Francine, Chrisse, Sri, Colleen, Deb, Beth, Gayle, Tammi, Barb, Jackie, Carol, Theresa, Harriet, Marge, Jennifer, Karen, Adele, Sunita, Terel, Gina, and Brenda, Gwenne, Dorothy, Cynthia Doleres and Jean. Their unseen labour, made visible by Winant, builds upon a legacy of feminist movement strategy, disseminating information and care for women by women, made possible by a deep commitment to intergenerational interdependence. 

The role of artmaking as a political tool is something Winant makes clear she is still grappling with in her essay at the book’s close.  She writes: ‘It occurred to me that building relationships was the point of the work rather than its subject. What if my work was reciprocal rather than extractive?’ Like the body of work at large, these ruminations sound simple yet offer urgent perspectives about how pictures are made, who gets to make them and how we assign cultural value to photography. The Last Safe Abortion leaves you wondering what would the world look and feel like if the images of violence and trauma being circulated at great velocity were replaced with models of care, collaboration and tenderness? ♦

All images courtesy the artist, SPBH Editions and MACK. © Carmen Winant

The Last Safe Abortion is published by SPBH Editions and MACK.

—
Gem Fletcher is a writer, consultant and podcaster. Her work has been published in Foam, Aperture, Dazed, Creative Review and The British Journal of Photography. She also hosts The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the future of visual culture and what it means to be a photographer today.

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• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique, and activism.

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age.

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect.

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries.

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto.

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous R. Dahmani.

Lydia Goldblatt

Fugue

Interview by Anneka French

Bones, skin, flowers, mirrors, golden light and heavy shadow are sensitively woven throughout Fugue, a new title by Lydia Goldblatt that explores her transition into motherhood while simultaneously carrying the loss of her own mother, she explains to Anneka French. Published by GOST, the book brings together tender photographs and fragments of text that touch upon this complex period within Goldblatt’s life. Her work, also part of a recent solo presentation with Robert Morat Galerie at Photo London 2024, was the toast of the fair.

Anneka French | Interview | 30 May 2024

Anneka French: Let’s start with the cover and the title. Can you tell me more about the musical notation and the word ‘fugue’?

Lydia Goldblatt: The cover is pink and the end papers red – I wanted it to be bodily – and it features the final bars of the last unfinished Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach who wrote The Art of Fugue, unfinished because he died. The image is taken from Bach’s original annotated manuscript in his handwriting. I like the notes floating untethered.

AF: The state of being unfinished is important to your work. Can you say more about the timeframe the book covers?

LG: Yes. Things exist in a continuum but it covers a four-year period around the becoming of, and the losing of, a mother. I wanted to make the book across those years because they are a significant marker of change and transition. When I started making the pictures, I didn’t know how long it would be until I stopped. I needed that length of time to draw out the themes and relationships, to allow it to grow and evolve.

AF: Did you always envisage a book? What were your thoughts at the start?

LG: To even start making is a massive hurdle. I didn’t make pictures for a good three or so years after having children. I did commissions but didn’t, and couldn’t, grapple with anything further. When I start making photographs, I don’t think about an outcome because otherwise I might not start at all. That said, once I began making and editing these, I was intuitively putting the pictures into book form. It felt like a narrative.

AF: The texts in the book exists in different formats and registers. In ‘Mother Tongue’, one part feels stern and directive while the other is more intimate and detailed. Could you tell me about these?

LG: ‘Mother Tongue’ is split into two voices, almost a call and response, but not quite. The first is the things that I might say to my children, the second is my internal voice. This text sits at the centre of the book because it’s about a very difficult emotion, rage, that is extremely hard to articulate but also fundamental to the experience encapsulated in the work. The rest of the texts are structured similarly to the photographs because the fragments don’t build a complete narrative. Instead, they allude to elements and go back and forth in time. Non-linear time is really integral to this work. A daily sense of time is underpinned with deeper time and the writing allows me to articulate emotions held in the pictures.

AF: Were the texts written intuitively?

LG: The texts and photographs were made separately. I made a lot of the photographs and then put them away in order to start the writing. I didn’t want to write to the photographs. I knew they were linked but I didn’t know how I’d edit it together. There were specific memories I wanted to explore in the writing but I just started and it wasn’t overly planned.

AF: ‘Fugue’ has quite different definitions in the worlds of music compared to psychiatry – harmony as opposed to disassociation.

LG: I think it has been a useful word. In domestic life, there are many interweaving strands with changes and repeats that build the idea and the feeling of family. I wanted to allude to these repeating strands to build a crescendo and a tune of some kind. It holds within it both intimacy and distance. Once the work became the object [the book], it became more claustrophobic and quite intense. The other element to the work is loss – a loss of memory and a loss of self, or a dissociative state. Grief and the transition to motherhood is captured in the word ‘fugue’ very simply. In Fugue, there’s a fleeing and a running towards – a push and pull.

AF: Yes. Photographs where children are balanced on the edge of furniture and hands reach out to wave or stretch. How do you approach photographing fast-moving children as opposed to a collection of objects that are, of course, still?

LG: With the moving children, there’s something playing itself out. The stacks of dishes by the sink or the Tupperware by the stairs are things that I walked past, thought about and then came back to, piles unconsciously created within the context of the house. There are other still lives that I set up to refer to a discussion or to set up symbolism. Further still, there are other objects that belong to my mother or grandparents – the little mirror and the scissors, and the broken statue which is both an object belonging to my family but also a symbolic setting up of a fracture. Another picture shows teeth which are mine and my sister’s. We found them in mum’s dressing table. They connect to fragility, preciousness and the macabre.

AF: It’s the cyclical nature of things happening, of things waiting to happen. Something common in early motherhood is a shrinking of the world down to your immediate surroundings. Fugue comes from your experiences but the pandemic is bound up in the timeline of the book too.

LG: Lockdown gave me the reason not to talk myself out of making the work. I didn’t really know I’d started making it. We scattered my mum’s ashes a few weeks before lockdown, and it was one of those days where you don’t get another chance. So I took my camera and kind of started things off. In lockdown, I experienced a clarifying of all the things that I’d been feeling. I had a reason not to put my camera down, knowing that this was a very particular phase, and motherhood and grief alike allowed me to explore those feelings. I could just let them go, let them run. This being said, the work is not just mine. It’s about me – it holds me and holds my children – but it can’t be of them because it’s me making the work. There’s a strange balance beyond and outside of me. The work has to hold other people’s experiences too, otherwise there’s just no point. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and GOST. © Lydia Goldblatt

Fugue is published by GOST.

—
Lydia Goldblatt is a British photographic artist based in London. Her work has been at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Somerset House, London, the National Museum, Gdańsk, Poland, the Felix Nussbaum Haus, Osnabrück, Germany, and the GoEun Museum of Photography, Busan, South Korea. Her first book, Still Here (Hatje Cantz, 2013), is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum National Art Library, London, and her work is held in public and private collections including the National Portrait Gallery and The Women’s Library, London. Her work appears in publications including Guardian Saturday, Financial Times, The Telegraph, Sunday Times Magazines, New Statesman, The New Yorker, De Zeit and Wallpaper*. Goldblatt received the GRAIN Projects Artist Commission in 2020 to develop Fugue, and received an award for her portrait from the series in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize.

Anneka French is a Curator at Coventry Biennial and Project Editor for Anomie, an international publishing house for the arts. She contributes to Art Quarterly, Burlington Contemporary and Photomonitor, and has written and had editorial commissions from Turner Prize, Fire Station Artists’ Studios, TACO!, Grain Projects and Photoworks+. French served as Co-ordinator and then Director at New Art West Midlands, Editorial Manager at this is tomorrow and has worked at galleries including Tate Modern, London, and Ikon, Birmingham.

Images:

1- From the series Fugue © Lydia Goldblatt

2- Bone, from the series Fugue © Lydia Goldblatt

3- Windows, from the series Fugue © Lydia Goldblatt

4- Eden in the Garden, from the series Fugue © Lydia Goldblatt

5- Lick, from the series Fugue © Lydia Goldblatt

6- From the series Fugue © Lydia Goldblatt

7- Twist, from the series Fugue © Lydia Goldblatt

8- Folds, from the series Fugue © Lydia Goldblatt

9- From the series Fugue © Lydia Goldblatt

10- Supernova, from the series Fugue © Lydia Goldblatt

11- Pedestal II, from the series Fugue © Lydia Goldblatt

12- Paper Bird, from the series Fugue © Lydia Goldblatt

Lisa Oppenheim

Spolia

Exhibition review by Jilke Golbach

In her Spolia exhibition at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Lisa Oppenheim boldly addresses the absence left by artworks confiscated or forcibly taken from Jewish owners during the Nazi regime. Utilising innovative photographic techniques, the American multimedia artist conjures the missing items and meticulously details their history. As Jilke Golbach notes, Oppenheim’s profound connection to the archival is palpable, resulting in a visually stark yet conceptually rich body of work.

Jilke Golbach | Exhibition review | 23 May 2024

A small globe sits wonkily atop a table crowded with books, papers, and scrolls in one of Lisa Oppenheim’s photographs in Spolia, on display at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam. Its precarious tilt intimates that a fall is about to happen, as if this short moment of suspension might, at any second, be shattered by the orb, smashing into a thousand little pieces. In art history and iconography, globes can signify a number of different things: power, knowledge and vanity. But in this 17th century still life (or rather, its ghostly reproduction), it also appears to carry a more literal meaning. Seen up-close in the gallery, Oppenheim’s inverted image reveals just enough detail for us to see that the globe – a favourite cartographic object of old masters like Johannes Vermeer – is accompanied by other navigational instruments. A compass and a nautical measuring device tell us this picture is one of maritime expedition, a testimony to the period’s absolute obsession with global exploration, trade and imperial domination.

Nature Morte (1943/2022), the little-revealing title of the picture with the globe, could have opened the show, symbolic as it appears to be of a body of work that is, in different ways, all about mapping and navigating, the (re)discovery of things that have been obscured, concealed or dispersed, and the movement of objects across the globe in the aftermath of (neo-)imperialist greed. At a time when restitution debates are at the heart of museum discourses, Spolia – meaning ‘spoils’, or repurposed objects, a Latin term originally employed for the re-use of ancient materials and structures – engages with the very impossibility of restitution, with the loss and absence of objects that will likely never be regained.

In Spolia, Oppenheim ventures into the complex histories of artworks that were confiscated or forcibly removed from Jewish owners during the Nazi regime and have been missing ever since – not to try and retrieve them but to transform their absences into new spectres of being. Through extensive archival research, the American artist follows the trails of these looted objects and uses the inventories, catalogue entries and photographic documentation she finds as the raw material for an experimentation with various techniques of reproduction, among which: the solarisation of gelatin silver prints and the production of textile works, photograms and slide projections. Oppenheim has spoken about this regenerative practice as giving the missing artworks ‘afterlives’, mobilising photography as a method to narrate their stories, their unfinished provenances otherwise.

Oppenheim is at home with the archival. Throughout her practice, she has repurposed, rephotographed, reprocessed and revisited historic imagery to explore the capacities and limitations of the photographic medium, often challenging its (in)ability to function as document, witness or evidence. In Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans (2007), for example, she went in search of the missing pieces from the hole-punched (or ‘killed’) Farm Security Administration photographs of Depression-era rural America – remnants of a ruthless editorial practice that was to prevent the photographs’ further reproduction in the 1930s. In another series, Smoke (2013), she drew on the Imperial War Museum archive in London to create large-scale negatives from aerial photographs of the bombing of Caen, France during the Allied invasion in 1944 by exposing the prints to the light of an open flame. Some of the photographic techniques and questions that run through these bodies of work also resurface in Spolia, where Oppenheim plays with chemicals, light and fabric to spool a web of traces that visualise absence.

Spolia is a visually austere, conceptually potent body of work. The muted blacks, whites and greys that populate the gallery walls play with the positive and negative photographic image, deliberately absorbing or reflecting the gaze of the viewer. Oppenheim uses the process of solarisation to invert the tones of documentary images, many of which were created through the Nazis’ bureaucratic infrastructure, including at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. The result is unnervingly otherworldly. The individual works – hung alone or in pairs – possess a kind of preternatural beauty (the eye lingers on the exquisite bloom of an ostensibly stemless tulip, or the sharply cut curl of a lemon peel), but Spolia is perhaps at its most striking when the photographs appear in sequences. Beim Spitzenhändler (1943/2024), for example, repeats the woven image of a lacework that was likely destroyed in the last days of WWII in an increasingly opaque transition from light to dark. The act of refashioning the missing piece of framed lace on a Jacquard loom, in which white replaces black one thread at a time, is Oppenheim’s way of reviving an object of which nothing is left but a trace of gelatin and silver.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Oppenheim overlays photographs of the Paris sky above 38 Avenue Henri Martin with fragments of the painting Miroir entouré d’oiseaux (1650/c.1700) by Jan Davidsz de Heem, one of 334 Dutch and Flemish masters taken from the Schloss family in the early years of the war. The smoke-like effect of the sky over the family’s former home hints at the way nearly half of that collection vanished without a trace. This arresting installation also underlines what a remarkable setting Huis Marseille is for the exhibition; the walls of the monumental canal house built by a French sea merchant in 1665 at the height of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’ of painting evoke a multidirectional homecoming of sorts for the disappeared Netherlandish masters.

Spolia might be read as a series of simultaneously sticky and slippery pictures. The curators at Huis Marseille effusively detail the histories and provenances of the missing artworks, the families they belonged to and the archives that hold their records. Some of these things cling to the images – names, places, dates, biographies, dimensions, associations. Yet, the haunted objects themselves remain almost infuriatingly elusive, just out of sight as much as they are out of reach. The harder one looks, the more any sense of specificity is relegated to fragmentation, an experience that is reinforced by Oppenheim’s gravitation towards the prevalent, visually repetitive genre of still lives and landscape paintings. Perhaps such a sense of disorientation is the point of this subtly profound body of work, in which Oppenheim does not serve up any answers but invites questions about history, memory and temporality, and about the nature of the photographic medium as a mode of (re)mediation. An engagement with these artworks beyond restitution requires navigating, and inhabiting, the positive/negative space of photography.♦

All images courtesy the artist and Huis Marseille, Amsterdam. © Lisa Oppenheim

Spolia runs at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam until 16 June 2024.

—
Jilke Golbach is an independent curator specialising in photography. She was previously Curator of Photographs at the Museum of London. Alongside her curatorial practice, she is completing a PhD project at University College London on the subject of heritage, neoliberal urbanism and the right to the city.

Images:

1-Lisa Oppenheim, Nature Morte, 1943/2022 (Version II), 2022. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles.

2-Lisa Oppenheim, Nature morte à la tulipe, 1637/2023 (Version II), 2023. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles.

3-Lisa Oppenheim, Pendant, 1943/2021, 2021. Courtesy THE EKARD COLLECTION.

4-Lisa Oppenheim, Landschap met Konijnen, n.d./2023 (Version I), 2023. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles.

5-Lisa Oppenheim, Stilleven met roemer, nautilusschelp en roos op een donker kleed, 1645-1655/2023 (Version I), 2023. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles.

6-Lisa Oppenheim, Stilleven met boeken en tekengerei, 1833/2023 (Version II), 2023. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles.

1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique, and activism.

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age.

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect.

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries.

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto.

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous R. Dahmani.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Exposure

Exhibition review by Taous R. Dahmani

A journey to Nottingham Contemporary prompts reflection on Tina M. Campt’s method of “writing to art” in Taous R. Dahmani’s review of Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Exposure. Dahmani writes to Sepuya’s introspective world, where intricate dialogues between mirrors, photography and identity unfold, challenging traditional spectatorship dynamics. Through a lens of queer and black representation, Sepuya’s work invites viewers to confront societal norms, embrace complexity, and navigate the fluid boundaries of self-presentation.

Taous R. Dahmani | Exhibition review | 14 May 2024

On a morning train to Nottingham, I decided to revisit a passage from Tina M. Campt’s A Black Gaze (2021). When the book came out, I had highlighted this sentence: ‘Seated cross-legged on the floor is my go-to position for writing to art.’ The statement struck a chord with me, prompting a personal vow to try Campt’s method. This visit seemed the perfect chance, but once there, I feared the invigilators might find it unconventional. Would I be allowed to sit on the floor of Nottingham Contemporary, ‘sliding down a wall and claiming the undervalued real estate of a gallery floor,’ as Campt wrote? The reason why I wanted to attempt that strategy in order to “write to” Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s exhibition was because Campt claimed it ‘minimis[ed] you as a viewer and maximis[ed] the work itself,’ adding: ‘Looking up at [the artwork] both breaks up and breaks down some of the traditional dynamics of spectatorship and visual mastery. And when the subject of that art is Black folks, challenging the dynamics of spectatorship and visual mastery is an extremely important intervention.’

I first encountered Sepuya’s work in 2020 at his solo show in London’s Modern Art, where black figuration and constructed stills through layered acts of looking were key. Four years later, upon entering Exposure at Nottingham Contemporary, I was greeted by a camera on a tripod before a black curtain held by a disembodied brown hand and bulldog clips. Facing this first photograph, I noticed my reflection in the protective glass, positioning my head’s shadow where the operator would be. At that moment, I realised that directly facing Sepuya’s work, rather than ‘looking up’ at it, might be beneficial. This exhibition wasn’t the place for Campt’s method of claiming gallery floors; Sepuya’s large-scale pieces demand that we meet them eye-to-eye.

As I approached Mirror Study (_Q5A2059) (2016), I understood that I was looking at Sepuya’s camera – meaning a mirror must have been placed between the lens and me. This apparatus, and placement of the mirror, suggests the artist is more concerned with what surrounds his camera – objects, people, himself – than with the eventual viewers. The mirror acts as a barrier, its thin reflective metal layer atop glass designed to bounce light back, prompting rumination on the idea of reflection, the image created by light and about photography. In The Mirror and the Palette (2021), Jennifer Higgie elucidated that Johannes Gutenberg opened a mirror-making business in 1438, and within just six years, he pioneered the invention of the printing press. This progression connects the concept of reflection to the notion of infinite reproduction, which ultimately lays the groundwork for photographic theory. Indeed, the coexistence of photography and mirrors has become paradigmatic. In his seminal 1978 essay, which serves as the introduction to the catalogue for his exhibition Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960, John Szarkowski leveraged the metaphor of the mirror to explore the introspective and personal approaches photographers bring to their medium. Similarly, the mirror is an integral part of Sepuya’s artistic process, acting as a catalyst that facilitates layers of analysis of his surroundings. Since 2010, the artist has focused on the artist’s studio as a subject, employing a self-imposed limitation akin to the protocols of a conceptual artist. He describes this approach as a strategy to ‘limit the number of variables as the clearest way to pose a question.’

As I progressed to the next set of images, the initially elusive figure of the photographer gradually emerged. Sepuya skilfully navigates the frame, either concealing or unveiling fragments of his undressed body, and thus, his identity. He delicately reveals details of his anatomy, including the hairs on his neck and arms, and close-ups of his back and torso. Photograph after photograph, his progressive apparition transforms the studio into a stage. We are witnessing the documentation of a performance, a play with characters and, of course, a message. The photographs or the mirror – in Sepuya’s world they are in constant dialogue – predominantly depict self-portraits or portraits of close friends and lovers. Beyond mere self-recognition through self-representation, there is a definitive act of self-presentation; a celebration of the artist’s freedom and agency. The performed gestures subvert gender binaries and reclaim their fluidities, so much so that Sepuya quite literally blurs surfaces and thus boundaries. We observe the movement of bodies on a stage, enacting intimacy and at the same time rendering a political identity that is both queer and black. Sepuya’s photographs recall the words of Judith Butler, who noted in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993) that the performative aspect of gender enables subversive actions capable of challenging and destabilising conventional norms. By inviting his friends to act for the mirror-camera in his studio-stage, Sepuya creates an experimental sanctuary for the development of a queer visual language. Engaging with Sepuya’s photographs is not straightforward; they challenge us to interpret and decode, but, at the same time, the repeated frameworks facilitate a steady understanding of his visual strategy. If, indeed, the mirror is not just a reflection but a boundary, then viewers are mere welcomed spectators. The exhibition feels like an invitation to partake in the acknowledgment of too often marginalised queer black and brown individuals. Viewers are brought into their proximity, invited to stand alongside them, yet rightfully kept at bay.

Sepuya’s work draws from a rich history of queer imagery, from the kouros figures of Ancient Greece to Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s Snap Shot (1987) and Caravaggio’s ephebes. These motifs have come to symbolise queer identity, thus raising the question: how can we interpret the revival of these motifs in today’s photographic production? As Sepuya bestowed, as an invitation to think complexly, ‘representation is not an agenda,’ and indeed his visual language strives for something more, something that revived, for me, José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), Here, Muñoz discusses a process in which individuals tactically interact with societal norms to forge a self that critically diverges from mainstream culture. He emphasises behaviours and gestures as crucial to the identity formation of queers of colour, beginning his book with the statement: ‘There is a certain lure to the spectacle of one queer standing onstage alone, with or without props, bent on the project of opening up a world of queer language, lyricism, perceptions, dreams, visions, aesthetics and politics.” It leads one to question whether Muñoz is actually describing Sepuya’s own photographs some 20-odd-years before their creations.

The studio and its “inhabitants” are constants in Sepuya’s work, existing in a fluid space where time seems relative and ideas and iterations evolve and transform. In the second gallery, elements such as mobile mirror flats from the studio transition into exhibition structures showcasing his latest photographs. Unlike the first room where close examination was encouraged, here Sepuya invites viewers to navigate the photographs, guided by their spatial arrangement. He transforms the space by bridging the private theatricality of the studio with the shared communality of the gallery. Leaving the exhibition, and tucking away my copy with Campt’s book, I was reassured that sitting wasn’t necessary, as Sepuya himself ‘maximises’ his work. He shifts spectator dynamics, elevating and redefining engagement by challenging traditional approaches. On the train back to London, I was left with the feeling that visitors ought to stand in the gallery, embracing homoerotic pleasure, whilst also striving to become accustomed to nuanced discomfort and grappling with complex ideas about image-making. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann Zurich/Paris © Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Exposure ran at Nottingham Contemporary until 5 May 2024.

—
Taous R. Dahmani is a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian, writer and curator. Her expertise centres around the intricate relationship between photography and politics, a theme that permeates her various projects. Since 2019, she has been the editorial director of The Eyes, an annual publication that explores the links between photography and societal issues. She is an Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Dahmani’s curatorial work was showcased at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France, where she curated the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2022). Dahmani is set to curate two exhibitions at Jaou Tunis, Tunisia (2024).

Images:

1-Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Twilight Studio (0X5A4176), 2022.

2-Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Model Study (0X5A7126), 2021.

3-Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Daylight Studio Camera Lesson (0X5A2613), 2022.

4-Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Pedestal (0X5A8997), 2022.

5-Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Studio Mirror (_DSF6207), 2023.

After the End of History

British Working Class Photography 1989–2024

Exhibition review by Lillian Wilkie

Debuting its tour at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry, After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989–2024, has been curated by writer and photographer Johny Pitts, with the exhibition’s title wittily alluding to Francis Fukuyama’s famed essay The End of History, citing an unfulfilled anticipation of global stability. As Lillian Wilkie examines, Pitts navigates the sociocultural turn of neoliberalism and creates a space for multiple, even conflicting truths of working-class life, challenging the dominance of singular historical narratives and entrenched social hierarchies. 

Lillian Wilkie | Exhibition review | 30 Apr 2024

‘The end of history will be a very sad time,’ writes Francis Fukuyama in the final paragraph of “The End of History?”, an essay published in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, which was later expanded into the 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. ‘In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.’ He concludes: ‘Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.’

“It’s a bit tongue in cheek, the title,” Johny Pitts tells me on the opening day of After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989–2024, an exhibition that surveys photographic representations of working-class life in Britain since the collapse of European communism, and the cultural and creative forces emergent under neoliberalism. The photographer and writer has curated the exhibition for Hayward Gallery Touring, a programme of exhibitions that tour galleries, museums and other publicly funded venues throughout Britain; After the End of History debuts at Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry before touring to Focal Point Gallery, Southend and Bonnington Gallery, Nottingham. Fukuyama’s thesis – that the triumph of liberal democracy as the dominant political and economic ideology after the fall of communism marked the end of humanity’s sociocultural and ideological evolution and a new era of geopolitical stability – has been much maligned, especially since 9/11, the rise of autocracies in China and Russia, and, notably, the crisis in living standards brought about by neoliberal capitalism. But through the lens of cultural theorists such as Mark Fisher and Natalie Olah, Pitts recognises the significance of this moment at the end of the 1980s: an optimistic, postmodern Britain on the cusp of the digital era. The title, tongue in cheek as it is, sets up the spirit of contradiction – that of a time after the “end of history” – which is one of two pillars defining the exhibition’s curatorial approach.

“I kept saying to the Hayward team that I want the show to be this big mess,” continues Pitts. “I think what I really meant was that I wanted it to be full of contradictions, like working-class life is. I didn’t want to reduce working-class people to avatars for some kind of moral or political point, which they so often are – sometimes for good reasons. I wanted to move beyond this tradition of middle-class people documenting working-class life, showing how tough it is. The reality of working-class life is way more ambivalent than that.” Starting from 1989, Pitts’ approach consciously departs from the socially-engaged, humanist documentary practices and worker photography collectives of the 1960s and 70s, and indeed the archetypal, paternalistic image of working-class people as largely white, male and soot-smeared. This, he believes, has shaped our expectations of what an exhibition of working-class photography might look like, something he seeks to upend. “I love that you’re going in and you think you’re going to see workers in pits and protests and stuff. And you don’t. You see Prince Naseem, and the glitches of the jungle scene.” Pitts is gesturing to two bodies of work just inside the entrance to the show. On the left, he has hung Trevor Smith’s kitschy studio portrait of the British-Yemeni boxer Naseem Hamed three times in a row (“I couldn’t decide which of the paper stocks I liked best, so in the end I chose all three. It gives it a Warhol element.”) On the opposite wall, Eddie Otchere’s saturated C-type prints of performers and ravers at jungle nights in mid-nineties London, with their sloppy borders and light leaks, are each a small essay in the sensorial correspondences between the darkroom and the nightclub. Pitts refers to these works as his “statement pieces”, setting the tone and intention for what is to come.

The exhibition features a diverse cohort of photographers, from art world approved names such as Hannah Starkey, Richard Billingham and Ewen Spencer, to new voices like Rene Matić, Serena Brown and Kavi Pujara. There are also what Pitts refers to as “jobbing” photographers: those working commercially, within communities, or outside of the gallery system, notably Trevor Smith and Josh Cole. Colour work abounds, leaping from deep brown walls featuring accents of day-glo yellow and typography referencing club flyer graphics. Music and clubbing emerge as crucial spaces for both the production of images and the construction of identities. Elaine Constantine’s pictures of dancers at Northern Soul nights at the 100 Club bear the energy, aggression and ecstasy of the dancefloor, depicting a tight-knit, highly coded scene forced further underground, united by a passion for rare cuts and all-nighters. The dancing bodies in Spencer’s photographs from Aya Napa in the glory days of UK garage are more self-conscious and aspirational, but no less libidinal. This was an unapologetically working-class subculture that sought the glamour of brand names and expensive liquor. “Spencer is not interested in what people want the working-class to look like, but what actually goes on,” Pitts explains. The histories of the Northern Soul, two-tone and ska scenes inform the work of Matić, whose practice navigates the complex intersections between West Indian and white working-class culture in Britain through photography and moving image: a self-defined genre they have coined “rudeness”, that promotes pleasure as a “mode of survival”.

From the dancefloor, the exhibition moves through contexts as diverse as the hotel, the hill farm, the council estate and the corner shop. The variety of photographic subjects and styles on display unavoidably raises the question of exactly what, at least within this exhibition’s rhetoric, makes a “working-class photographer”? A focus on “working-class” cultural expression after 1990 seems initially curious considering the end of the Cold War consolidated a new phase of neoliberalism that would ultimately leave workers further behind whilst simultaneously empowering them as consumers, reshaping the class structure entirely. Traditional taxonomies of upper, middle and working-class culture are now much more fragmentary and slippery, defined as much by social and cultural factors as well as occupation and education. A 2003 study on class by the BBC and six British universities found that the established three-tier model had disaggregated into seven class categories ranging from the “elite” to the “precariat”. Nonetheless, a key theme running through the selection is an interest in the circumstances and conditions in which photographic work is produced, and under what financial pressures. A number of the projects were produced within the context of the photographer’s day job, underscoring Pitts’ preoccupation with “art against-the-odds”. A vitrine, shaped to reference a bar or a DJ booth, houses photographs, ephemera and notes scribbled on napkins from Anna Magnowska’s bilateral working life as a café waitress and sexual health nurse, shapeshifting across social roles in Soho’s underbelly.

JA Mortram’s Small Town Inertia draws a sensitive portrait of marginalised lives in the Norfolk town of Dereham, shot whilst Mortram worked as a carer for his mother, experiencing the isolation and alienation of austerity Britain. Like Mortram, the works of the Merseyside-born photographer Chris Shaw force a lens on those who are largely rendered low-status or invisible. His Life as a Night Porter series presents the “social fantastic” of a London hotel’s twilight hours, confronting the often-unseen labours of those who live, work and play by night. These are just some of the projects in the exhibition that attempt to correct what Mortram identifies as an “imbalance of truth”, a contemporary response to the socially-engaged practices of the 1970s that argued for a “history from below”. Pitts is content for the working-class label to be contested. “I didn’t worry about it too much,” he says. “It’s a term that just really resonates with my own experience. It’s hard to say exactly what it is, but if you know it, you know,” suggesting a methodology based more on instinct than fixed criteria, in defiance of the hypotheses of sociologists and academics; more felt than understood. This attitude speaks to the second pillar structuring the exhibition: that of autobiography.

‘I found Josh Cole’s work after I was sacked from Debenhams, Meadowhall,’ recalls Pitts in one of the exhibition’s wall texts. Elsewhere: ‘When I think of Sam Blackwood’s photographs without looking at them, they are populated by people I know. It’s always a surprise, then, to look at them and remember that the images are unpopulated, such is the subtle, sculptural composition of ingredients and spaces many of us recognise.’ The wall texts that accompany each body of work contrast institutional authority with personal testimony, divided as they are into more conventional museological descriptions, followed by poignant reflections from Pitts (in a way that feels novel and, in the context of the museum, excitingly disruptive) that elucidate on connections between the images and formative moments from his own life. He grew up in between two Yemeni families who were related to Prince Naseem, and the boxer was idolised. “These photographs remind me of staying up way past my bedtime, eating my neighbour’s khubz and lahmeh, to watch our hero beat someone in America, and then thank Allah for the win before bragging in the mixture of broad Yorkshire and African-American ebonics that so represented our culture.” In this way, the curatorial methodology emerges as less socioeconomic or even art historical, but autobiographical. A boombox by the entrance plays his sister’s cassette tapes, recorded from 1990s pirate radio in Sheffield – something he resolves to feature at every exhibition he does, “to soften the gallery space a little”.

One is left with the sense that the end of history for Fukuyama was the beginning of a new history for Pitts, who returned in 1990 from a period of living in Japan as a child to his home in working-class Sheffield, to find that most of his family were no longer working in factories and steelworks, but now had retail jobs in the new Meadowhall Shopping Centre, itself built on the site of a former steelworks. Through the images selected, Pitts navigates the material legacies and spectres of this sociocultural turn, and create space for multiple, even conflicting truths. In this way, the exhibition materialises as a counter-institutional gesture; a potential corrective to the complicity of the museum and institution – and indeed photography – in the enshrining of social hierarchies and the privileging of history in the singular. As he writes in his 2020 book Afropean, on the convolutions of Black experience in Europe, it serves as “[an] effort to begin with the personal in order to arrive at the universal”. After the End of History shows us the ways that photography has complicated traditional understandings of working-class identity and experience, and presents a vision of working-class life that, like (for the most part) art itself, resists taxonomy, transcends whiteness and promotes contradiction. If you know, you know.  ♦

All images courtesy the artists, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, and Hayward Gallery Touring.

After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989–2024 begins its tour at Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry and runs until 16 June 2024. 

—
Lillian Wilkie is a writer, editor, publisher and lecturer based in London and East Sussex. Her practice and research focus on arts publishing and its communities, photography and contexts, and marginal fashion media. She is the Director of Chateau International, an imprint producing books, zines, editions and programming, and Co-Director of Bound Art Book Fair at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and INVENTORY Book Fair at Cromwell Place, London. She works in the book programme at Aperture. Her writing on photography, arts and publishing has appeared in titles including Modern Matter, Elephant, 1000 Words and C4 Journal. She lectures on photography and fashion media programmes at London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Images:

1-Serena Brown, Bollo Bridge, 2018.

2-Ewen Spencer, Necking, Twice as Nice, Ayia Napa, 2001.

3-Serena Brown, Clayponds, 2018.

4-Kavi Pujara, Maharana Pratap & PC Ravat, Marjorie Street, 2021.

5-Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1993.

6-Anna Magnowska, Eros, 2019.

7-Rob Clayton, Early “Bush” Transistor Radio, 1990-91.

8-Rob Clayton, Lin, Careers Advisor and Mother, Wilson House, 1990-91.

9>10-Sam Blackwood, Rat Palace, 2013-ongoing.

11-J A Mortram, Small Town Inertia.

 

Rahim Fortune

Hardtack

Book review by Taous R. Dahmani

In his new book, Hardtack, Rahim Fortune compiles nearly a decade of work, blending documentary with personal history within the context of post-emancipation America. Through coming-of-age portraits that traverse survivalism and land migration, Fortune illustrates African American and Chickasaw Nation communities. As Taous R. Dahmani observes, the iconography of the American South is drawn between Fortune’s Hardtack and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, released only a few days after — both of which raise questions that serve to redefine ‘Americana’. 

Taous R. Dahmani | Book review | 17 Apr 2024

At the end of March, something very odd happened: Loose Joints dropped Rahim Fortune’s second photobook Hardtack, and, a few days later, Beyoncé released her eighth album Cowboy Carter. I can almost hear you – yes, you, reader – wondering, what’s the connection? Well, there are several. Firstly, it serves as the perfect soundtrack to look at Fortune’s photographs. As if sound was taking form. Beyoncé’s extensive 27-track list echoes Fortune’s 72 photographs; her lyrics resonating with his visual language. Both artists delve into the iconography and sound of cowboys, churches, southern mothers and daughters, rodeo, sashes and Fortune even closes his book with a “Queen Coronation”. Besides this serendipitous overlap, both artists also actively reclaim, redefine and adjust the notion of “Americana”. Wrapped in a denim-like cover, Hardtack speaks of a specific geography and moment: Texas today, the USA in the 2020s.

Beyond the anecdote of their shared Texas origins, both explore the history of the American South – one through music, the other through photography – connecting its past with its present. 2024 is a pivotal election year, with the southern states bearing a significant responsibility in shaping the country’s future (and, arguably, the world’s). Therefore, there is an urgent need to disseminate an alternative understanding or narrative of what the US might be. After all, the title of Fortune’s book, Hardtack, refers to an emergency survival food, made from flour, water and salt, signalling that we are in the midst of a critical juncture. At a time when states are banning books to erase chapters of US history, Hardtack feels like a welcomed defiance.

In her proudly made-in-America “country” album, Beyoncé embraces the soundscape of the southern states and her Black musical heritage, blending blues, soul, rock ‘n’ roll and gospel. Similarly, an incredible living encyclopaedia of American photography, Fortune quotes – or samples – his ancestors, from Walker Evans’s depictions of southern architecture to Roy DeCarava’s intimate portraits of Black life. Just as Beyoncé pays homage to Linda Martell, the first commercially successful Black female artist in country music, Fortune channels the social documentary style of Milton Rogovin, his portrayal of African-American communities akin to Earlie Hudnall Jr, and mirrors the political consciousness embodied by Consuelo Kanaga. Furthermore, Fortune examines Arthur Rothstein’s documentation of African-American families in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, originally captured for the Farm Security Administration and later featured in Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941). With Hardtack, Fortune engages in a self-conscious dialogue with photography’s history.

The parallel between music and photography transcends mere coincidence; its potency lies in their shared democratic practice and dissemination, but it also resonates with what Tina M. Campt described in A Black Gaze (2021) as a ‘broader commitment to understanding visual culture through its entanglement with sound, and highlighting the centrality of sonic and visual frequency to the work of Black contemporary artists.’ Already, in 2017, Campt beckoned us to listen to images, and more recently, she revisited the idea employing the concept of frequency to challenge ‘how we see’, adding that ‘the physical and emotional labour required to see these images gives us profound insights into the everyday experiences of Black folks as racialised subjects.’ Listening to Fortune’s Hardtack is to pick up on various stories and histories such as the legacy of Gee’s Bend quilts, crafted by descendants of enslaved individuals who toiled on cotton plantations. These local women united to establish the Freedom Quilting Bee, a worker’s cooperative that enabled crucial economic opportunities and offered political empowerment. As Imani Perry eloquently states in the book’s concluding essay: ‘What we know as Black Texas was birthed through captivity. This land has been a bounty; and also a burden.’ Fortune captures the architecture of past power and oppression – the grand plantation houses alongside the slaves’ huts –and the remnants of this legacy, showcasing what barely survives in the wake of US history. Beyoncé’ sings in “YA YA” (2024): “My family lived and died in America, hm / Whole lotta red in that white and blue, huh / History can’t be erased, oh-oh / Are you lookin’ for a new America? (America).” In “Night Ride Tracks, Archer, Florida” (2020), Fortune kneels down to capture the sunlight beaming on the old train tracks, which bear witness to the 1928 Rosewood massacre during the era of Jim Crow laws. In “AMEN” (2024), Beyoncé’s reminds her listener: “This house was built with blood and bone / And it crumbled, yes, it crumbled.”

On the following page, Fortune presents a captivating portrait of his partner, Miranda, underscoring that his documentation of the American South is as personal as it is political. With roots in both the African-American and Chickasaw Nation communities, Fortune traverses rural towns that are close to his heart, pausing to engage in conversations with friends. Fortune embraces the formal conventions of documentary traditions whilst ushering us into novel sensations and uncharted emotional territories. Opening the book, we can almost grasp the wind, and, as we delve deeper, we feel the humidity of the Mississippi enveloping us, the scorching sun on the road casting its light upon each image. His photographs record what stands proud, what is forced to break, what disappeared but can still be traced. In Fortune’s photographs, people are praying, watching, playing, waiting, celebrating, caring and driving; leading an unremarkable life because ‘attending to the infraordinary and the quotidian reveals why the trivial, the mundane, or the banal are in fact essential to the lives of the dispossessed and the possibility of black futurity.”’ Texas also serves as the backdrop for Fortune’s personal grief – as depicted in his first book I can’t stand to see you Cry (2021) – and serves as a place where remembrance holds paramount importance, as evidenced by the tattooed dates of key life moments on his friend’s skin. Fortune’s Hardtack is a poignant tribute, both a requiem for those lost and a homage to those whose actions altered the course of history. Yet, it is also a celebration, capturing the essence of joy found in everyday moments and special occasions alike. It is this unique and delicate coexistence of remembrance and revelry that imbues Hardtack with its profound resonance, showcasing the depth of Fortune’s artistic maturity.♦

All images courtesy the artist and Loose Joints. © Rahim Fortune

Hardtack is published by Loose Joints.

—
Taous R. Dahmani is a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian, writer and curator. Her expertise centres around the intricate relationship between photography and politics, a theme that permeates her various projects. Since 2019, she has been the editorial director of The Eyes, an annual publication that explores the links between photography and societal issues. She is an Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Dahmani’s curatorial work was showcased at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France, where she curated the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2022). Dahmani is set to curate two exhibitions at Jaou Tunis, Tunisia (2024).

Images:

1-Rahim Fortune, Windmill House, Hutto, Texas, 2022.

2-Rahim Fortune, Praise Dancers, Edna, Texas, 2022.

3-Rahim Fortune, Willies Chapel, Austin, Texas, 2021.

4-Rahim Fortune, Hardware, Granger, Texas, 2018.

5-Rahim Fortune, Highway I-244 (Greenwood), Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2021.

6-Rahim Fortune, Gas Pump, Selma, Alabama, 2023.

7-Rahim Fortune, Deonte, New Sweden, Texas, 2022.

8-Rahim Fortune, Ace (Miss Juneteenth), Galveston, Texas, 2022.

9-Rahim Fortune, Night Ride Tracks, Archer, Florida, 2020.

10-Rahim Fortune, Tinnie Pettway, Gee’s Bend, Alabama, 2023.

11-Rahim Fortune, VHS Television, Dallas, Texas, 2021.

12-Rahim Fortune, Abandoned Church, Otter Creek, Florida, 2020.

Craig Atkinson

Café Royal Books

Exhibition review by David Moore

Currently exhibited at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, Craig Atkinson’s Café Royal Books presents an eclectic collection of social relics where regional pasts intermingle, and previously unseen or half-remembered social histories are vividly recalled. With a sense of relative authenticity, the exhibition invites viewers to delve through a collection of three hundred books that capture past lives through the lens of another. David Moore reflects on the display and the project’s position among the ongoing reassessment of documentary photography.

David Moore | Exhibition review | 11 Apr 2024

As documentary photography finds new form amidst recurring questions of its legitimacy and purpose, Craig Atkinson’s monumental publishing project, Café Royal Books, presents a crowd-pleasing repository of the photographic distant, that in its entirety could be understood as a document itself of a particular photographic age.

A relatively small display of CRB’s output is currently installed at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, giving a glimpse of its residual value. The project presents an eclectic collection portraying mainly British, but also international, work of previously unseen or half-remembered social histories. Without acknowledging it, CRB shows “documentary photography”. Atkinson says: ‘Documentary is just a term like any other, and really I use it to help define what I don’t publish, rather than exactly what I do.’ The project presents works, loosely spanning 40 years. Browsing the catalogue online, I found content from the late 1940s (Dorothy Bohm’s pictures of Paris) to the 2010s (Thabo Jaiyesimi’s Nation of Islam UK 1989–2018, published last year). In-between is a diverse collection of the eccentric, mundane, the archetypal and unexpected; everything really.

CRB is driven by “functional” and environmentally light economy to allow all of this. Atkinson describes his project as being ‘somewhere between craft and punk,’ which is an apt description of his stripped down, DIY, home-made ethos. Production is cheap, retail price kept to affordable rates, ‘based around the price of a London pint.’ Pre-production, the photographer is asked to provide scans, a sequence and title, then is offered a design that is tweaked, over email. The book’s release is scheduled, and that’s it. Occasionally, special editions are offered, or second editions published.

CRB shares characteristics with the larger publishing houses. The model excludes any monetary payment to the photographer, an arrangement that has become routine for the publishing of books in recent years (only a handful of very well-known artists make any profit from direct book sales). With CRB, the photographers are offered a portion of books for themselves as “payment”. The “industry” has seemingly acquiesced to such arrangements in the knowledge that publications can be seen as promotion for print sales, exhibitions and finding audiences for works that otherwise may have been left in a proverbial box at the back of the studio.

Much of the CRB project reflects a popular interest in realist photography that is not necessarily associated within the academy or related photographic learning. Nostalgia and localism play a huge part; the value of seeing the fabric of one’s past life through the eyes of another extends access to a wide audience. Although most content is from professional or “trained” photographers, we might understand that a portion of the work relies upon a relaying of the “everyday”, a photo-journalistic or “newsy” approach. There are also the more authored documents drawing upon the aesthetic legacies and concerns of the documentary genre. It is this crossover that presents a fascinating blend suggesting that content leads the way rather than any emphasis on particular sub-genres.

What is evident, looking through the display at The Photographers’ Gallery and the online shop, is that the project occasionally reads as both a celebration and a salvage ethnography of the near. London Street Markets 1960s–1970s (2020), Old Ladies of Whitechapel (2013), Sheffield Tinsley Viaduct (2013), Glasgow Steamies (2014) and so on; lives captured and presented joyously. Such works and others represent an enthusiasm for social realism that preceded (or ignored) any de-constructivist critique of documentary and held photography up as an uncomplicated social tool.

In this sense, nostalgia for the genre itself also plays a part in the appeal of CRB’s output, further defining the project, reconsidering the documentary medium itself as a particular movement at a particular time in history, alongside questions of the conditions that created such mass activity that largely involved photographing the lives of others. In this sense, one might squint and find a mass participation project by proxy, a culturally assimilated ethnography by many like-minded people who have shared similar photographic educations and happen to be born in the early to mid-20th century, figuring out their place in the world through the observations of others.

The legacies of this contribute to the enormous reach of CRB’s output, that could be easily edited and curated into larger narratives and publications of documentary approaches, based around geographical location, social thematics and so on. And with scale in mind, there are inevitable analogies and shared interests to be made with the Mass Observation Project or even the much-overlooked German and Russian located Worker Photography Movement, with, of course, significant differences regarding their origins, social histories and political contexts.

On the night of the private view, the exhibition space was continually busy, as the audience were involved in a brisk and satisfying material engagement with the works on show, handling, looking and putting back. Whilst the installation at the gallery will clearly be enjoyed, for logistical reasons it shows only 300 books whereas the upcoming show at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, will reveal 700. To see CRB’s output in its entirety would be an ideal (and conceptual) installation offering a monumental showcase to what is a monumental project.

One of documentary photography’s strengths is its ability to project social history. Arguably, a distrust of photography’s intersection with AI, for example, may embolden this, having a refreshed relative authenticity on a popular level at least (and, whatever happens, an interesting dialogue is about to ensue). The analogy with the Mass Observation Project, and its relatively low-key activities contemporarily, brings forward questions around the supply of work that CRB publishes and whether it might dry-up. I have a friend who mudlarks in the Thames, finding ancient artefacts, some of which are now in the Museum of London. We marvel at how, at each turn of the tide, new riches are given up, seemingly inexhaustibly. Photography, too, just keeps coming, but how does the production of modern social narratives, which most of us participate in with our regular uploads, fit into the documentary paradigm that is presented by CRB? The relocation of such vernacular work made continually on camera phones has similar but differing values. Enabling such egalitarianism would be a natural fit with the politics of this amazing project.♦

All images courtesy of Café Royal Books

Café Royal Books runs at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, until 2 June 2024.

—
David Moore is a photographic artist and Principal Lecturer at the University of Westminster, London, where he teaches on the Expanded Photography MA programme.

Images:

1-Amelia Troubridge, Motörhead, from Motorhead UK, 1997 

2-Amelia Troubridge, Urban Cowboys, from Urban Cowboys Dublin, 1996

3-From Being British 1975-2005 © Barry Lewis

4-Cover of Being British 1975-2005 © Barry Lewis

5-Chris Miles, Musical Float. From Notting Hill Carnival, 1974

6-Cover of Parfett St Evictions, 1973 © David Hoffman

7-From Burnley 1970s © Dragan Novakovic

8-Cover of Black Power Black Panthers, 1969 © Janine Wiedel

9-Cover of Football Fans, 1991 © Richard Davis

10-Cover of Early Colour, Hulme Manchester, 1985 © Shirley Baker

11-Cover of Northern Soul, 1993-96 © Elaine Constantine

12-Cover of Rock Against Racism Live: 1977-1981 © Syd Shelton

Acts of Resistance

Photography, Feminism and the Art of Protest

Exhibition review by Max Houghton

Acts of Resistance, a collaborative exhibition by the South London Gallery and V&A Parasol Foundation for Women in Photography, confronts the systemic brutalisation and circumscription of women’s bodies worldwide — from persecution in Bangladesh, oppression in India to solidarity with Palestinian freedom. As Max Houghton writes, this is not a show for performative activists; it’s really doing the work — the exhibition fosters a reparative gaze, challenging historical narratives of control and subjugation, and calling for greater community involvement and institutional accountability. 

Max Houghton | Exhibition review | 4 Apr 2024

Even before entering Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminism and the Art of Protest, a curatorial collaboration between South London Gallery and V&A Parasol Foundation for Women in Photography, the content guidance reveals the show’s necessity: ‘Artwork in this exhibition includes references to […] sexual violence, femicide, female genital mutilation, gender and sexuality-based discrimination, genocide and racism.’ This short institutional statement tells us precisely how the world is structured and how the bodies of women+ are circumscribed and brutalised, deliberately and systematically. Stepping in, the first visible work, suspended from the ceiling, takes gentle possession of the viewer, who is immediately enfolded into the plaited hair of young Iranian women. Three larger-than-life prints by Hoda Afshar are responding to Iran’s Women Life Freedom movement with the symbolism of unveiled hair, of the plait’s own revolutionary turn, or pichesh-e-moo, and of the dove’s flight between peace and martyrdom. The death of Mahasa Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police weighs heavily, as does the courage of the women who protest, risking their own lives. My thoughts turn too to the immorality and illegality of the Metropolitan Police on this city’s streets; to the lives and legacies of Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, of Sarah Everard, of Chris Kaba; and to what kind of imaging or imagining might bring justice to them.

The first message, then, of the show’s images is that they open a space within which such global ultraviolence can be considered, resisted and perhaps – rarely – extinguished. Two artists whose works are curated close by, Poulomi Basu and Sofia Karim, are committed activists, whose work has given rise to legal change. Basu’s multimedia work and its dissemination contributed to the banning of Chapaudi in Nepal, a practice which sees girls and women banished from society during menstruation; left to inhabit unlit, unsanitary temporary huts, at risk of assault in remote fields.

Karim’s activism was ignited by the political imprisonment and subsequent torture of her uncle, the renowned photojournalist Shahidul Alam, in Bangladesh. Like human rights activist G. N. Saibaba, for whom she has also campaigned through her exquisite drawings and letter exchange, Alam was eventually released. Karim’s work, Turbine Bagh (2020–ongoing), resonates in any setting, though in a night at the museum, it would surely leap off its designated shelf and populate a central artery through the space. Significantly, it is the only work in the show that foregrounds the art of other activists, which Karim has transferred onto samosa packets, conferring an increased sense of sociality and hospitality within these acts of resistance. For this show, whilst works centring women’s experience have been selected, in terms of anti-rape protests in Bangladesh or Muslim girls’ right to wear a hijab in Karnataka, India, Karim’s feminism also insists upon exposing the cruelties of the caste system via a Dalit protest in Una, and the Kerala Sisterhood’s support for Palestinian freedom. From her series Sisters of the Moon (2022), Basu’s futuristic self-portraits pool, siren-like, across the gallery walls, seducing the viewer into uncertain territory, incanting through their worldly knowledge the names of pain. The spectral image of Basu on a bed, uncannily placed at the shore’s edge, alongside water urns, invites questions of refuge, of sanctuary, of survival, and helped raise £5million for WaterAid.

This is not a show for performative activists; it’s really doing the work. Three major London institutions have curated feminist/activist shows in the past year; a welcome and vital taking up of art space by, for and with women+. This outpouring of activist-propelled art, in terms, for example, of the vast scale of Re/Sisters (2023) at the Barbican and Tate’s Women in Revolt! (2024), or the geographical breadth of Acts of Resistance, is indicative of the fact that such shows are long overdue, and we have so much to say. I say this in the year the Royal Academy offered its first ever solo show to a female artist, Marina Abramovic, in its 250-year history.[i]

This show has taken the idea of the “fourth wave” feminism of the last decade as its timeframe, which is at once necessary to fit the available space, ensures intersectional and expansive feminisms – a plurality noted in the show’s subtitle – and yet misses the chance to visually connect these present concerns through time. Such legacies are not, however, absent. The show’s first section, “Body as Battleground”, is essentially a dedication to Barbara Kruger, whose own solo show at the Serpentine took place earlier this year. The legacy of the Saint of Christopher Street gay liberation campaigner and trans activist Marsha P. Johnson is enshrined in Happy Birthday Marsha! (2018) by Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel, which reimagines the night of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, when, yet again, the role of the police as guardians of the most vulnerable is found entirely wanting. The way Johnson inhabited her personal freedom was revolutionary; achingly beautifully rendered in this short film, in what Saidiya Hartman might call a ‘critical fabulation’, in which historical or archival omissions of a life are reconstructed. This work occupies the emotional heart of the show, along with that of Aida Silvestri’s Unsterile Clinic (2015). By any measure, this is an astonishingly visceral work, on a subject no one but no one wants to talk about, yet is transformed by the artist’s loving hands into artworks of such grace, they turn silence into speech. Drawing on her own experience of female genital mutilation, she has been able to work collaboratively with other similarly-affected women to visualise the different forms the procedure has taken, creating models, on display here in a vitrine, which are now used for identification – over 200 million women and girls are affected globally – by the NHS in the UK. The work also takes the form of a single, non-identifying self-portrait, in which the artist wears a wedding dress, embellished with razor blades in place of pearls, and embroidered red thread, flowing beyond the frame. The image pulsates with the injustice of the religious and social construct of virginity and every act of violence it has engendered.

I unite these two specific works in the strongest spirit of the right to self-determination – and its frequent absence – which courses throughout the exhibition. Of the two vital works on the subject of abortion, in this instance, I would have selected Winant’s The Last Safe Abortion (2023) for the light it sheds on the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade in the US, and invited Laia Abril to show her work On Rape (2020–ongoing), or Femicides (2019–ongoing), as another bloody framing for the show as a whole. Yet, as always with her meticulously researched work, Abril’s situating of abortion as a global institutional failure bristles with eloquent rage. The last time I wrote about Nan Goldin’s Memory Lost, the V&A was still funded by Sackler, a position it reversed in 2022; the result of a sustained campaign by Goldin and PAIN, which included a die-in at the museum, indicting the creators of Oxycontin, the highly addictive opioid, for their life-destroying crimes. Goldin’s way of being in the (art) world – she has been called a “harm reductionist”, surely an aspirational epithet – is propelled by honesty, and, I can’t say it too often, by love. The wrong things, she says, are kept secret. They still are, and the shame that encircles such secrecy kills with the same violence as a blade or a gun.

Much of the work in this ground-breaking show pierces such shame with love, and Raphaela Rosella’s work HOMEtruths (2022) explodes with love and care for and with a First Nations community in New South Wales, Australia. This entirely unsentimental, joyful, heart-breaking, polyvocal three-screen film shows the effects of the incarceration of women on them and their families. Part of a wider work, You’ll Know It When You Feel It (2012–ongoing), Rosella’s co-creational approach resists, intervenes in and often completely overturns juridical and bureaucratic representation and replaces it with rich familial bonds in a form of justice, both aesthetic and restorative, which is exceptionally deeply felt.

In terms of the photographic image, these artists are pushing the discipline forward, far from its histories of control and subjugation. In their hands, we encounter sculptural, filmic, archival, collaged and embroidered forms, which make for multi-sensory ways of seeing, decentring the camera’s power; a reparative gaze. Questions for the next shows foregrounding women+, no doubt already in production, include how to understand the gallery as even more of a forum, involving more community groups and building on existing links with brilliant but underfunded and therefore precarious local resources. How can the institutions that fail us, that maim, that kill, be further held publicly accountable via image-led or art-based discussion? How can artists whose practice isn’t defined within the confines of socially engaged practice in and of itself expand the social purpose of their work in a gallery space? And how can the white Western female curatorial approach, expansive and assiduous as it surely is, in terms of Sarah Allen and Fiona Rogers, as well as Alona Pardo and Linsey Young – brava to all – continue to find ways to share its considerable power ever more effectively? Not because it isn’t showing us the most pertinent, mind-expanding, courageous work, not because it isn’t taking great care of the people who make it, but because of what it – and I – just can’t see.♦

All images courtesy South London Gallery

Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminism and the Art of Protest, with a public programme curated by Lola Olufemi, runs at South London Gallery until 9 June 2024.

—
Max Houghton is a writer, curator and editor working with the photographic image as it intersects with politics and law. She runs the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, where she is also co-founder of the research hub Visible Justice. Her writing appears in publications by The Photographers’ Gallery and Barbican Centre, as well press such as Granta, The Eyes, Foam, 1000 Words, British Journal of Photography and Photoworks. She is co-author, with Fiona Rogers, of Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now (Thames and Hudson, 2017) and her latest monograph essay appears in Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81 Voices (Steidl, 2023). She is undertaking doctoral research into the image and law at University College London and is the 2023 recipient of the Royal Photographic Society award for education. 

References:

[i] I say this in a year when the police force with responsibility for London remains institutionally sexist, racist and homophobic. I say this when two women this week, as every week, will be killed in the UK by the hands of their partner or former partner. I say this on a day when the US abstained from the UN vote for a ceasefire in Gaza, where sexual violence is being frequently reported as a weapon of war.

Images:

1-Hoda Afshar, Untitled #14 from the series In Turn, 2023. © Hoda Afshar. Image courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Meeanjin / Brisbane.

2-Sethembile Msezane, Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell, 2015. Photo: Courtesy the artist

3-Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel, Happy Birthday Marsha!, 2018. Courtesy the artists and Chapter NY, New York.

4-Poulomi Basu, from the series Sisters of the Moon, 2022. Courtesy the artist, TJ Boulting and JAPC.

5-Guerrilla Girls, History of Wealth & Power, 2016. © Guerrilla Girls, courtesy guerrillagirls.com

6-Mari Katayama, just one of those things #002, 2021. © Mari Katayama

7-Zanele Muholi, Bester, New York, 2019. © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York.

8-Sheida Soleimani, Delara, 2015. © Sheida Soleimani. Courtesy Edel Assanti.

Rut Blees Luxemburg

The Essence of Architecture

Interview by Michael Grieve

Rut Blees Luxemburg’s exhibition at Hamburg Werkstatt Fotografie, Germany, brings together large-scale photographic work concerning the representation of the city and the phenomenon of the urban. Here the artist discusses the selection and configuration of images in the exhibition, foregrounding liquid elements in the photographs that refer less to bodily failure and human fallibility than that which is unruly and essentially turbulent, thereby threatening the established dry and dusty order of power and control, she explains to Michael Grieve.

Michael Grieve | Interview | 2 Apr 2024

Michael Grieve: The Essence of Architecture is the curious title of your exhibition. Why did you choose this title? Indeed, is it possible that architecture can possess an intrinsic value or does it need a representation to convey this quality?

Rut Blees Luxemburg: The title of the exhibition comes from a short text by the philosopher Alexander García Düttmann, who wrote in response to my photographs on the work of the architect Nicolas Ledoux: ‘The essence of architecture is the sphincter.’ The philosopher gives a provocative meaning to the term ‘essence’. Yet it is not disagreeable, and alerts us to the body in relation to architecture, how we construct space to present and be private. If the camera becomes receptive, an un-burdened eye even, it might be able to capture an allusion of that essence. The eye, revered by Claude Nicolas Ledoux, became the focus of his architectural thinking and design, the eye as the organ of control and surveillance, but equally the eye as the organ of visual pleasure and delight. Ledoux presaged photography and its hold on our visual imaginary. In these photographic works and configurations in the exhibition, I wanted to emphasise the essentials: the sewer, the spills, the leaks, the ground.

MG: What exactly do you mean by “the essentials”? Are these leaks, spills, the sewer and the ground representative of some kind of anthropomorphic relation to the body? In this doomed utopian vision, in the Foucauldian sense, are we not always subject to return to the fallibility and limitations of our very human condition: the body that leaks, decays and ultimately fails us?

RBL: If we look at a work like The Font, we see a large basin with an obscure function in the harbour of Le Havre, in which discarded wine bottles, empty beer flasks and various other remnants of what looks like the accumulated aftermath of a continuous party swim. This “primordial soup” can be read as a hellish vision of disorderly nocturnal excess or it can serve as a tableau that recalls the joys of commingling, night-time debaucheries and carnivalesque, Brueghelian pleasures. The emphasis on the liquid elements in the photographs does not refer to bodily failure and human fallibility but is a sideways turn to that which is unruly and essentially turbulent, thereby threatening the established dry and dusty order of power and control.

MG: In your artistic practice, from very early on during the 1990s, you have been preoccupied with photographing the urban terrain at night. As a painter may use a particular palette of colours to convey a particular scene, you have used the given artificial light of the city, emphasing the peculiarity of this light and how it registers on film. And in your later work, there seems to be a sense in which your photographs are not recording the surface, but actually extracting something visceral from it. Although the opposite of extraction, this reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov when he says in the book, Transparent Things (1972), that when you observe an object long enough, you begin to sink into it. Can you explain your choice and fascination with the light of the urban terrain?

RBL: Some of my 90s work has an excessive palette, particularly intense greens and lurid yellows. These colours were exciting and wrong, certainly not calibrated, an hallucinatory offering into an experience of the city. Long exposures during the night with the 5×4 camera stretched and distorted the diapositive films colour capabilities while providing depth of field and accuracy of detail. The specific London sodium lighting of the time added a warm glow. The notion of sinking or falling into appears in many of the works of that time. From the Vertiginous Exhilaration (1995) from the top of the East End high-rise to the liquid entry points, be they reflective puddles, or the river, all inviting an immersion, a letting-go and falling into. My interest in the city was two-fold: to visually express what feeling at home in the public sphere is for me, or, in other words, how to dwell on a site, and to challenge the representation of the urban as a foreboding, dangerous, impoverished place. The urban light at night sets the scene, and it is immediately clear that we are finding ourselves in a constructed space, a human-made fiction, hence, a space that can also be de-constructed or re-imagined.

MG: You gave me a copy of a recently published book with a yellowish green cover, entitled Pissing Women (Climax Books, 2023) by the English artist, Sophy Rickett. I remember this work from the 90s when it was made and published in Creative Camera. It features three female artists as the performers, or should I say, activists, engaged in the act of pissing in the “male” stance of standing up, set within the context of the City of London, the financial “square mile”. It is a wonderfully provocative and satirical performance, featuring Sophy Rickett and yourself. Although Sophy Rickett is the author of the work, it was obviously a collaborative process and given the urban terrain, fits well with your own urban aesthetic concerns. Can you elaborate on this work and your own experiences of it at that time?

RBL: I got to know Sophy when we studied together on a BA Photography at LCP in the early 90s. We bonded and have bounced off each other, stimulating ideas, photo-theoretical arguments and various side-hustles ever since. Not long ago, we conceptualised Hi-Noon together, an innovative proto-type to support photographic artists. Back in the 90s, in addition to being students, we had various part-time jobs as temps in the city to fund our London lives. The experience of being present in the city, the financial dynamo of the UK, during the time of the yuppies, de-regulation and the occasional bomb from the Northern Ireland conflict, was certainly formative. I developed a series of works titled Chance Encounters which saw Sophy and I being present in the public sphere of the city, after dark, cos-playing so to speak, as city execs and engaging with strangers we met. These works asserted our right to be confidently present in the city, a playful pretence inserted into the hub of power. Parallel, Sophy developed the Pissing Women series, which emphasised our presence in a bodily way, marking the urban territory with our urine, a masculine technique we learned to perfect. Photography was the perfect conduit to capture these interferences and actions.

MG: The uncanny aspect of your photography is made apparent by the seeming lack of arbitrary decisions of the visual fragments you decide to frame, accentuated by your relatively limited productive output. And yet conversely it appears that you have a knowingness that what the photograph captures far exceeds the intention, therefore what you photograph allows unconscious meanings and associations to transpire. 

RBL: Limited productive output?! I might make under 10 photographic works a year, but those are in the context of all my other artistic projects such as public art works, art books, curating as well as the teaching and researching. All of those creative endeavours nourish and enrich the photographic works, which can be seen as a distillation. A high-percentage spirit, that contains those unconscious meanings and stimulating associations you refer to. I aim for my photographic works to be condensed but expressive, with a hint of the flamboyant.

MG: The Essence of Architecture features a faux peruke, reminiscent of powdered wigs worn by men during the 18th century. Of course, this archaic object is there to evoke the essence of Ledoux, who designed and built the Saline Royale between 1775–78. A photograph of a common metal watering can, illuminated in sodium light, situated in what looks like a communal garden of a council estate in London, is adorned with the title, Latent Babylon. Humour is a major component of your work, with elaborate, satirical and absurd titles to each individual print carefully positioned often as textual destabilisers to the images, and sometimes vice versa. In some manner, it feels that your work is performative, theatrical even. 

RBL: The wig Libertine is woven by the artist Jasmine Padjak from fresh yucca fibres. I was attracted by the verdant-green of the wig, an organic fragment of historical representation. I asked the artist if I could host this work in my exhibition to be the absent protagonist, the revolutionary architect, who might connect all the elements. The titles to the works can be a detour via the non-scenic route, or a literary denouement to challenge a purely visual response to the image, a device to keep the image unfixed and open for myriad readings and interpretations. The intrinsic irony of the world is there for the photographer to capture and stage. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Hamburg Werkstatt Fotografie © Rut Blees Luxemburg

The Essence of Architecture runs at Hamburg Werkstatt Fotografie until 11 April 2024.

—
Rut Blees Luxemburg is an artist who explores the city and the phenomenon of the luminous. Her solo exhibitions include Phantom (Tate Liverpool, 2003) and London Dust (Museum of London, 2015), and her photographs have been shown in elles @ centrepompidou, Paris. Her work has been the subject of the opera Liebeslied/My Suicides, and her large-scale public work Silver Forest (2016) is installed as a permanent part of the façade of Westminster City Hall, London. Blees Luxemburg is also a Reader in urban aesthetics at the Royal College of Art, London, where she teaches on the MA Photography and Co-Leads the Spatial Value research catalyst. She created the album cover for Original Pirate Material (2002) by The Streets. She is a Director of FILET, London, and Co-Founder of HI-NOON. Her publications include London – A Modern Project (1997), Commonsensual (2009) and The Lesson of the Vine (2019).

Michael Grieve is a photographer, Director of ArtFotoMode, Hamburg Werkstatt Fotografie (HWF) and lecturer at Ostkreuzschule in Berlin. In 1997 he graduated from the MA Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster and then proceeded to work as a photojournalist and portrait photographer for publications internationally. He was Deputy Editor of 1000 Words and a writer for the British Journal of Photography. Since 2011 he has been Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, Akademia Fotografie Warsaw and the University of Art and Design, Berlin, and currently teaches at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, Berlin. He is currently working on Procession, a project documenting the peripheral space between Athens and Elifsina, Greece.

Images:

1-Rut Blees Luxemburg, Icarus Project, 2016.

2-Rut Blees Luxemburg, London Dust, 2013.

3-Rut Blees Luxemburg, Piccadilly’s Peccadilloes, 2007.

4-Rut Blees Luxemburg, The Font, 2008.

5-Rut Blees Luxemburg, Factory Utopia, 2021.

6-Rut Blees Luxemburg, Saline Dream, 2019.

7-Rut Blees Luxemburg, Die Hütte, 2023.

8-Rut Blees Luxemburg, The Dark Intestine of Nicolas Ledoux, 2019.

9-Rut Blees Luxemburg, The Security Guard, 2019.

10-Installation view of Rut Blees Luxemburg: The Essence of Architecture at Hamburg Werkstatt Fotografie.