Category: Issue

Stephan Keppel

Hard Copies

Essay by Taco Hidde Bakker

Taco Hidde Bakker reflects on his recent curation of Stephan Keppel’s Hard Copies at Camera Austria, Graz, a parallel book and exhibition project characterised by the entanglement of the material appearance of (things in) cities, ways of picture-making and arrangements of images and found objects.

“Who is the master and who is the copy?” turned out to be the crucial question when the Dutch artist Stephan Keppel and I finished our preparations – including multiple calls to discuss our plans to build a physical scale model – for Keppel’s first-ever international solo exhibition, at Camera Austria, Graz. After more than one year of multiple lockdowns and an ever-deepening screen-dependence (pulled toward them like moths), this question seemed more pertinent than ever. It is also an underlying theme in Keppel’s work produced over the last decade, where in recent years he experiments with physical objects placed within the vicinity of their variously Keppelesque representations. Ultimately, what we wished to achieve in our exhibition was an interplay of visual correspondences within a wide selection of many different works made and printed (and collected) by Keppel from the point his “city series” began. Since 2011, Keppel has published four books dedicated to as many cities: Den Helder, Paris, New York and Amsterdam.

For the artist and curator arriving into Graz, as outsiders, my wish was for Keppel, who never visited Graz previously, to see it beforehand and possibly include new works in the exhibition. The idea was that this fresh encounter would result in the artist’s idiosyncratic processes of scanning, printing and reprinting. In a four-week frenzy in May, Keppel processed several images that he had captured in late April. One experiment with an image showing the word “ZIMMER” (“ROOM”) on a façade led to the provisional title of what might become a new city book or booklet: Immer Zimmer (Always Room). In the exhibition, we managed to weave the many facets of Keppel’s urban reflections together in a playful yet reserved manner. Some curatorial anchors worked-up in the scale models materialised wonderfully, while we also left ample room for improvisation. I take it as compliment that many visitors thought that things were done on purpose whereas in actual fact they were gifts, such as the rhythmic reflection of the light tubes in the four vitrine tables showing books, reference materials, (test) prints and found objects.

Stephan Keppel’s four photo/graphic books attest to an incisive exploration of the relations between built environment, image and book. In Keppel’s books and spatial presentations, there is an entanglement of the material appearance of (things in) cities, ways of picture-making, arrangement of images and found objects. The working process of his books published so far swings between cycles of taking photographs, appropriating image files, printing the files using (often discarded) printers, rescanning and reprinting. This results in idiosyncratic, oftentimes abstracted images with material qualities that are interwoven with the material surfaces of the built world to which these images also refer. There arises visual tensions between the image as image and the image as a window onto something beyond its own.

The tone was set with Reprinting the City (2012) on the small Dutch city of Den Helder. It is the first of the four books that Keppel laid out and edited in collaboration with the designer-publisher Hans Gremmen from Fw:Books. The book is A4 – the default copying paper format – and the following three books keep to this size. It can be read as a stack of documents against the grain (the mode is more medium-focused than documentary). In the cover image, a dotted halftone screen overrules an image of calm waves on the ocean’s surface. A black stripe emerges from an out-of-sync double printing of the same motif, overlaid at the edges. Discarded objects figure prominently, including DVD players, disk drives and record players. The thrift store and street are pleasure grounds for Keppel’s eyes. He is a ‘street comber’ according to the artist Roeland Zijlstra. The comber is normally someone who combs the beaches for treasures that might have washed ashore. Zijlstra furthermore notices that Keppel’s way of rendering discarded objects means that ‘he removes from the remainders of life the sadness that adheres to them and he exposes an underlying character – tender robust radiant intimate.’

A key feature of Keppel’s practice is that it is recursive. Already in Reprinting the City, there are several indicators of a recursiveness that becomes much more pronounced in later works. There are photographs of prints lying on the floor, their edges curling up, and photographs showing images (misprints perhaps) that might appear elsewhere, too. There is a flat file cabinet placed on its side, and a playing with halftone screens. In the dream-like Entre Entree (2014), Keppel took these experiments a step further. He stayed in Paris on two residencies for a full year, at the Van Doesburghuis in Meudon-Val-Fleury, a studio-living space designed by Theo van Doesburg in the 1920s, and at the Atelier Holsboer in the Cité des Arts. Keppel circled around the city’s busy Boulevard périphérique, and explored the city’s outskirts. Façades of postwar modernist or brutalist buildings, entrances, doors, marble and the occasional exotic plant feature prominently. Paris offered a new passage into Keppel’s world of strolling, picturing, scanning, printing, reprinting and of photographing studio settings.

Keppel honoured the city he spent the least time in (physically) with the heaviest tome, Flat Finish (2017). “It is so New York,” said the photographer Ken Schles. The city wears differently than Paris; it is much more unruly in its architecture, despite the solid grid structure of its layout and the ever-polished “renewal” taking place in a Manhattan ruled by speculative flash capitalists. Keppel’s an-iconic vision of New York is far removed from any tourist guide. When the Empire State Building comes into view, it is a heavily pixelated dilution from tweeted pictures. The second-handedness of the city comes to the fore here. Keppel scanned the websites of sellers of reused building material before going to New York, examining the archives of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal beforehand. Upon arriving, he already had a focus on the recycling of the city which eternally rebuilds itself. Of course, this once again looped back into Keppel’s own practice of circling and recycling. As the artist and writer Adam Bell remarked in a review in the Brooklyn Rail in 2018: ‘[Keppel’s] repurposed images function as building blocks for [his] own metropolis while also pointing to the regenerative and iterative process of both the built world and Keppel’s image-making.’

Keppel appropriates the cities that have become the locus of his books (the city mostly being a geographic limitation determining the working terrain for a certain period of time) and adapts them to the iterative processes of his printing obsessions. How would the city of Amsterdam, which he adopted as his home, be incorporated into his image world? The fourth “city symphony” is the most elaborate to date. With each new book, the domain expanded with regard to image types and sources to be included. While in the earlier books only the exceptionally well-versed city expert would recognise the images’ origins, in his new book Keppel included detailed notes about his sources in a type of coda. Keppel’s eye for intriguing details is contagious. Details that nearly everybody rushing from A to B would not notice become monumental in Soft Copy Hard Copy (2021): visible are hand-painted numbers from World War II, flattened house numbers from the days of the Amsterdam School building style, tape marks on the sidewalk and concrete cylinder leftovers from public construction works. Here, Keppel weaves many more strands together, from his minute photographic observation of architectural details or of prints in flat file cabinets to various found “readymades” in the streets or even found diapositive slides originally belonging to the Stedelijk Museum, showing artworks from their collection by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondriaan and Joel Shapiro. There is a page scanned from the novel An Evening in Amsterdam (1971) by K. Schippers. This author is an astute observer, too, with a keen eye for unattended details and the serendipitous: ‘Sometimes the curb is just a sidewalk tile, situated vertically, or a brick, placed on its side. Never similar, always a difference of levels. Never connected perfectly, curbs. See, there’s a crack between these zig-zag shapes that were meant to connect them tightly.’♦

This essay is adapted by Taco Hidde Bakker from his text “Cities of Thrift and Ink” accompanying the exhibition Hard Copies at Camera Austria, Graz, until 15 August 2021.

All images courtesy the artist and Camera Austria, Graz © Stephan Keppel

Installation views of Hard Copies at Camera Austria, Graz. Photographs by Markus Krottendorfer

—

Taco Hidde Bakker is a writer, teacher, translator and curator in the field of the arts, specialising in photography. He studied at two art schools before obtaining an MA in Photographic Studies at Leiden University. He has contributed his writing to numerous artists’ books, catalogues and magazines, including Camera Austria International, Foam Magazine, British Journal of Photography and TRIGGER. Bakker is the author of the text collection The Photograph That Took the Place of a Mountain (Fw:Books, 2018). He teaches Theory at the Utrecht University of the Arts.

Images:

1>9- Installation view of Hard Copies at Camera Austria, Graz, 2021. Photograph by Markus Krottendorfer.

10-Studio view Tonerprint, from the series Soft Copy Hard Copy (Amsterdam), 2021.

11-Stephan Keppel, ‘Painted house numbers from World War II’, from the series Soft Copy Hard Copy (Amsterdam), 2021.

12-Stephan Keppel, ‘Spuistraat 22’, from the series Soft Copy Hard Copy (Amsterdam), 2020.

13>15-Stephan Keppel, from the series Reprinting the City (Den Helder), 2012.

16-Stephan Keppel, ‘Les Plantes Pantone’ (Paris), 2014.

17-Stephan Keppel, from the series Entre Entree (Paris), 2014.

18-Stephan Keppel, ‘Unibeton II Paris’, from the series Entre Entree (Paris), 2014.

Hoda Afshar

Speak The Wind

Book review by Taous R. Dahmani

Taous R. Dahmani considers Hoda Afshar’s use of magical realism as a strategy which seeks to redeem documentary photography from its propensity for an Orientalist discourse.

Is photography redeemable? What I mean by that is: is it able to be recovered or saved from its past faults? More specifically, is documentary photography redeemable? As a photo historian, I regularly ask myself these questions, and, as a lens-based artist, Hoda Afshar has been centring these inquiries into her practice – especially since 2014, when she started her series In the exodus, I love you more, which marked her return to the documentary form. Born in Tehran in 1983 and now based in Naarm (Melbourne), Afshar pursues her investigations into the potentialities and limits of the medium with her newest editorial project entitled Speak The Wind, published by MACK. Historically, photography, and particularly documentary photography, has been a powerful imperial language, one of the many colonial tools facilitating, in particular, visual constructions of East/West and South/North dichotomies. In 1978, Edward Saïd wrote that the “Orient” and the “Occident” were man-made, and I would add that they have been perpetuated by man-made photographs in which the Other became a character of a Western narrative.

In her practice, Afshar wishes to “embrace the limitations of photography”, and, by doing so, proposes a tale of dismantlement, decentring and restructuring. It is from the locus of liminality that she takes apart her medium, challenging representation from within. The first and last images that frame Speak The Wind are a colour and a black-and-white photograph of the same wind-carved feature taken from two opposite perspectives. Through this structuring, Afshar seems to suggest that her creative documentary practice is embedded within a flux of change. As Trinh T. Minh-ha wrote: ‘To create is not so much to make something new as to shift’ (1991). Speak The Wind does not offer objects or characters to gaze at, but an articulation of images to consider, an assemblage of enunciations.

Here, Afshar roams several islands in the Strait of Hormuz. Located on the southern coast of Iran, in the Persian Gulf, the islands have been a cornerstone of international trade since Antiquity and is still today a hotbed of geopolitics. Every day, the islands’ inhabitants can watch hundreds of oil tankers passing by and observe their natural resources – such as ochre, iron and copper – being exported. Beyond these economic realities, minerals moulded the islands and shaped their landscapes. In 2015, for her first trip, Afshar arrived as “the Iranian” – the non-insular, the Outsider – and set foot for the first time on the black sand of Hormuz’s beaches, walked on its red soil and witnessed its ochre horizon. Having learned of local shamanic curing practices, Afshar did not expect to experience the magical gusts. During her many trips to the island, not worried about being afflicted by zār ­­­(the local, “harmful wind” believed to cause discomfort or illness), Afshar pursued her creative negotiation and critical engagement with the medium. Little by little, her visits transformed her participant observation into an observing participation. Rather than forging a typology, like an ethnographer might do, the photographer started crafting a topography – as understood by Chela Sandoval as a feminist oppositional consciousness (1956) – tied to the specificity of Hormuz as a contact zone, a multi-layered territory and a crossroads of realities and fictions.

In Speak The Wind, Afshar has conceived the renditions of her practice and journey methodically, and, as such, the book echoes Nancy Fraser’s theory of ‘participatory parity’ (2005): the subjects are not only spoken about but speak themselves. Indeed, the book includes anthropomorphic drawings of the winds made by the islanders and interviews conducted by Afshar about the experience of being possessed by zār. Through this polyphony, the photographer developed an alternative vision, a conscious third eye, to take up Fatimah Tobing Rony’s notion (1995): a hybrid gaze, between heart and brain; a bodily experience generating ‘pensive images’, as considered by Trinh (1991): ‘The image is subversive, not through violence and aggression, but through duration and intensity. The eye that gazes with passion and acuteness is one that induces us vaguely to think – as the object it sees is an object that speaks. The image that speaks and speaks volumes for what it is not supposed to say – the pensive image – is one that does not facilitate consumption and challenges the mainstream.’

Afshar’s ‘pensive images’ are a subversion of the medium’s propensity for an Orientalist discourse, in particular through her choice of addressing “non-rational” elements. Her images work as a transformation of states: from gaseous to solid, from ungraspable winds to tangible photographs. And so, I ask myself, can magical realism – current in literature and in paintings ­– play a role in the development of a truly multicultural and decolonial photographic sensibility? Can Afshar use magical realism’s subversiveness as a strategy to (partly) redeem photography? Can she reconcile the distinction suggested by Martha Rosler when she wrote: ‘photography is something you do; magic is an ineffable something that happens’ (2004). In texts, magical realism serves marginal voices, submerged traditions and stories driven by local knowledge: all three elements are included in Afshar’s book. There are no literary works that are wholly conceived out of magical realism, but rather passages, yet the effect of these moments affects our entire reading. In the same way, the photographer offers moments of pure magic as well as other moments when the images are aware of their own artifice, thus maintaining a flow between fact and fiction. A red cloud in green water. Glittering black sand enabling us to walk on a starlit ground. The red waves of a bleeding sea. The marvellous grows organically out of the ordinary, “abating” Cartesian distinctions. In Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road (1991), the tales of the adventures of Azaro, the child narrator – who exists between the real and the spirit worlds – says: “The wind of several lives blew into my eyes.” With Speak The Wind, Afshar shares with us a magical gaze dialoguing with unseen winds.♦

Images courtesy the artist and MACK © Hoda Afshar

—

Taous R. Dahmani is a photography historian, PhD researcher and critic, working between Paris and London. She is interested in the links between photography and politics. She regularly gives talks at Les Rencontres d’Arles, Paris Photo and Tate Modern. She is on the editorial board of MAI:Visual Culture and Feminism and co-editor of The Eyes magazine.

John Myers

The Guide

Book review by David Moore

David Moore discusses John Myers’ documents of domesticity and de-industrialisation in the Midlands region of England whilst considering the value in revisiting an already-familiar view.

In his essay “The Artist as Anthropologist” (1975), Joseph Kosuth asked: ‘why not have the anthropologist […] anthropologize his own society?’ He concluded, some paragraphs later, that the ‘artist – anthropologist’ would make a better job of it, addressing territory familiar to themselves, mapping an ‘internalizing cultural activity in his own society and within his own social matrix’.

John Myers’ The Guide arrived, an overview of differing collections of black-and-white photographs from the period 1972–88, published by RRB Photobooks. I am familiar with the territory represented; not only as a photographer but also as a fellow Midlander. Growing up there in the ’70s, I was a contemporary of some of the younger children portrayed. I recognise the patios, the Little Red Riding Hood coats (my sister had one), pet rabbits on suburban lawns and the general décor of the wider environment. Myers lived within this cultural matrix before photography had ever entered his life and because of this, as viewers, we find ourselves already beyond a particular veneer, already within the interior.

Yet, such proximity has to be negotiated. The work’s raison-de-etre is the everyday, and photography’s limitations are such that when we look at what is close to us, we might need reminding of its value. Myers opens up the process through a valuable first-person commentary that echoes the visual work in its deadpan style that helps avoid a simplistic reading of the series as any average survey of English suburbia, contextualising his methods and preventing some photographs from being overlooked, not because the images are badly made or too easily described, but because of their much-discussed banality.

That the pictures are ‘boring’ is continually emphasised, yet one viewer’s ordinary is another’s spectacle. To photograph something is to monumentalise it, allowing the uncanny to emerge. Of Myers’ work in this collection, this is most true of ‘The Bed’ (1976), where the cavernous tones of such a benign object propose latent fearsomeness within the candlewick bedspread that almost fills the frame. I’m reminded here of the surreal experimentation of Bill Brandt’s domestic interiors, but here, there is no such trickery with perspectives, just a fairly straightforward view.

The ‘Furniture Store’ (1974) photographs too are astounding in their revelations. A small series of photographs showing simulacra of family living rooms in shop windows; artlessly arranged and underlit, perform as an abeyance to a petit-bourgeois compliance and “Home in time for tea at 6” that sets the tone for much of Myers’ consumerist backdrop.

These, and the majority of the portraits from The Guide, are complex and understated photographs. Myers makes the point that, throughout the making of these works, whilst influenced by various histories of photography (and presumably a history of art), he was never funded and never intended for the pictures to form ‘a project’. He ‘just took them’, no exhibition in mind, no wanting to please anyone but himself and his sitters, no business plan. His own description of his practice gives the impression that photography is a thing that happened to him, and that the pictures were just there. This is also evidenced in an apparent non-interventionist method of working, as Myers tells us of a subject adjusting his sitting position. “Don’t move”, thought Myers, as though an entire contract would collapse if he actually directed a pose for the camera; all had to occur around him to be valid.

Myers’ photographs resound most impactfully when closer to home and working within familiar territory, and ‘The End of Industry’ (1981–88) series, that sees the book out, feels out of place in this collection, addressing a quite distant socio-political discourse, away from the suburbs. He writes, quite honestly, that he ‘ran out of steam’ and, in contrast to the aforementioned, non-interventionist position, was, at one point, out ‘looking’ for photographs. These images employ similar visual grammar to many of the ‘domestic’ images within The Guide and again are opened up by Myers’ commentary. The photographs of ‘The Female Brickworker’ (1983) particularly articulate this, locating the subject of the picture within an industrial context that, quite feasibly, might exclude her from the relatively affluent environs of Myers’ usual territory. In spite of the eloquent visual record of de-industrialisation during this period of history, one might consider that, within this publication, the idea of ‘old industry’ was a diversion; one with which Myers may not have needed to walk the extra mile, but sit it out at home, to see what happened.

Such inclusions raise questions of the book’s purpose beyond the commodification of a familiar view, particularly where the works have been previously published and are obvious best-sellers. Besides the fast-moving desires of collectors to acquire such objects, this may be understood in a variety of ways. But given the premium prices for his other publications, I was left thinking that this collection’s primary role is in making some of Myers’ work affordable to a larger audience.

As Myers acknowledges his influences, we find familiarity within the photographic precedent, and, as an admirable gesture of transparency by the artist, the roll-call of photographers is welcome. His straightforward list of snappers orientates the viewer towards Myer’s own photographs in a highly specific manner that opens up endless imagining.

As we regard Myers’ photographs in the 21st century, we can understand documentary photography as a particular artifice within the visual overload of the contemporary. The historical period represented here was, in reality, a flammable construct of new social realities in colour, offering entirely different interpretations of social history. Yet, Myers’ was a response that was satisfyingly redolent of the time; a confident interpretation of the histories within his own back yard and a reliable anthropology of the near.♦

All images courtesy the artist and RRB Photobooks © John Myers

—

David Moore is a photographic artist and the Principal Lecturer for Documentary Photography and Photojournalism at The University of Westminster, London.

Ming Smith

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph

Book review by Taous R. Dahmani

Taous R. Dahmani contemplates the ways in which Ming Smith’s self-portraits – their heterogeneity and transformability – constitute a practice of affirming her kaleidoscopic being to the world.

Several years ago, in the hope of discovering early photographs by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, I opened, for the first time, the pages of The Black Photographers Annual (1973). While Moutoussamy-Ashe’s work does not appear in the first volume – but only from the second – starting my reading with the first issue meant I came across the name of Ming Smith and what was apparently her very first publication. Launched in 1973, on the initiative of the Kamoinge Workshop, the periodical operated as a unique space for African-American photographers to determine independently both the content and conditions of publication and give them control over words and images: something that had been denied to the vast majority of them up until then. In her Aperture monograph (2020), Smith – who was the first female member of the collective – recalled: “this group of Black male photographers wanted to take control of their own images – their humanity.” The empowering agency necessary for the implementation of such an editorial project is an effective way for photographers to come into existence as authors of their images. In the introduction to the first volume, Clayton Riley suggested that The Black Photographers Annual enabled an “awareness of self”. At the time, I understood this phrase in line with consciousness-raising practices in the broader political context of 1970s America and its possible links with the affirmation of the African-American photographers’ “photographic identity”.

Of the forty-nine photographers published in The Black Photographers Annual, I remember being struck by Smith’s portfolio. More specifically, the second photograph piqued my interest when I realised that the silhouette in the lower left corner could be the reflection of the photographer holding her camera with both hands. Through a game of reflections, that can sometimes make us lose our spatial cues, the figure of – what I still hope is – Smith comes into being. The relationship between the photographic process and that of the construction of an identity was asserted by Smith as early as 1973 as quoted in her bio from The Black Photographers Annual: “My photographs attempt to open the passageway to my understanding of myself.” A passage Smith would take throughout her career, making her self-portraits some of the most interesting aspects of her work. Seeing herself, beyond imposed images.

As Neelika Jayawardane wrote: “When Smith picks up her camera and photographs the intimacy of her face and body in a multitude of situations and places, it is a response to her own beautiful aliveness, her situatedness within a moving world.” Framing herself at the bottom of the picture is something she would do again in the 1989 self-portrait with her Canon camera, where, against the backdrop of a floral wallpaper, she contorts her torso in order to aim at a mirror, the reflected image revealing the upper part of her face, the skin of her back and her hand, once again, holding her camera. This image ought to be considered in line with the long and popular tradition of women photographers’ self-portraits-with-their-cameras, as exemplified by one of Smith’s friends and influences, Lisette Model – from the 1955 half-naked bathroom picture to the 1982 Paris hotel room photograph.

In one of the interviews published in her monograph, Smith stated: “being a photographer was a journey that was about my conversation with my camera.” Smith’s photographic practice is undoubtedly marked by experimentation, offering several departures and different arrivals around her identity as a photographer, a woman, an African-American, a dancer, a music-lover, etc. – an idea echoed by Trinh T. Minh-ha in When the Moon Waxes Red (1991): “Since identity can very well speak its plurality without suppressing its singularity, heterologies of knowledge give all practices of the self a festively vertiginous dimension.” Time and time again, Smith dared to turn her lens towards herself because of the urgency of affirming her kaleidoscopic being to the world. For being the first African-American female photographer to be collected by MoMA did not, according to her, make much of a difference in her life, and certainly did not interrupt the process of her own recognition and self-affirmation as a photographer.

As a model, dancer and jazz-enthusiast, performativity played a central role in Smith’s self-portraits, as exemplified in Me as Marilyn (1991) or Self-Portrait as Josephine (1986), the latter serving as a clear homage to Josephine Baker but perhaps also to Katherine Dunham, whose “Technique” Smith learnt when she arrived in New York from Ohio. In his book In the Break (2003), Fred Moten pointed out that “black performance has always been the ongoing improvisation of a kind of lyricism of the surplus – invagination, rupture, collision, augmentation.” A quality we can also easily find in Smith’s 1990s Ellen Gallagher-esque collage of a 1972 self-portrait. The multitude of her self-portraits – their heterogeneity and transformability – work as an emancipatory practice. Not published in the book, and yet essential in the construction of the self through the image, is her 1986 self-portrait as she is breast-feeding her son – an image taken ten years after Deborah Willis’ triptych, I Made Space for a Good Man (1975-76), entitled after a Philadelphia College of Art professor told then-art student Willis that “a good man could have been in [her] seat.” Performing maternity for their cameras states something about female photographic experiences, disobeying traditional considerations about the constructed image of The Photographer as male and White. As bell hooks wrote in Art on My Mind (1995): “to transgress we must return to the body.” We could also mention Diane Arbus’ 1945 self-portrait with her daughter, Doon, where, once again, the maternal body is at the centre of an experimentation with the photographic medium and still asserts desire and reflexivity.

I could write many more words on Smith’s self-portraits; I could also write about Smith’s photographic walks into the night, her spirituality, the blurs, the paint, the poetic titles, the light and the darkness, the phonic substance and the auratic nature of her photographs – and a lot of people have been very good at doing just that. But when reading the interviews Smith gave about her practice, I am struck by the lexicon of sensuality used by the photographer to describe her relationship to image-making. The inexpressible in the expressed. Smith often states that she “follow[s] [her] impulses”, or that photographic discovery is “a turn-on for [her]”. Yxta Maya Murray even wrote that “she picked up her Canon and held it to her face as if it were a lover.”

So I wonder, should we not start considering Smith through the prism of the erotic? Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation (1966) and Trinh (1991) argued for “an erotics of art”; Moten too, speaking of Duke Ellington’s music (2003), spoke of an “erotics of the cut”. As such, should we not consider an erotics of Smith’s practice? After all, the cover of Smith’s monograph is her photograph entitled Male Nude, New York (1977). But what inspires me the most to make this point is Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, published in Sister Outsider (1984). For the African-American writer, poet, feminist and civil rights activist, the erotic needs to be understood as a creative power: “We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.” And she added: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” Perhaps all that is left here for me is to invite you to have a look at Smith’s monograph, as an introduction to her work and an invitation to read between the lines, with Lorde’s words in mind.♦

Images courtesy the artist and Aperture © Ming Smith

—

Taous R. Dahmani is a photography historian, PhD researcher and critic, working between Paris and London. She is interested in the links between photography and politics. She regularly gives talks at Les Rencontres d’Arles, Paris Photo and Tate Modern. She is on the editorial board of MAI:Visual Culture and Feminism and co-editor of The Eyes magazine.

Obituary for the artist duo Broomberg & Chanarin

By David Campany

On the occasion of the posthumous retrospective of Broomberg & Chanarin at Fabra i Coats Contemporary Art Centre, Barcelona, David Campany elicits a co-authored obituary for the renowned artist duo.

Adam: 

Dear David, Olly and I are about to announce the official end of our collaboration with a show at Fabra i Coats Contemporary Art Centre in Barcelona called “The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin”. I would love you to write an obituary for this artist. I don’t know anyone who has had more influence on that artist and who has also been fearless as an outspoken critic of it. Would you consider writing a standard say NYT length obit. The show is on Feb 20 and we would like to pitch it beforehand so time is tight. Please would you consider it. It’s a really big moment for us and it would close a circle in some way and allow for a fresh new start. Let me know your thoughts D.

David: 

In the spirit of this authorial play, the artists should write it and Mr Campany will sign it. Graham Lee, secretary to David Campany 

Adam: 

Are you serious?
You will sign your name to anything we write?

David:

I’ll check with him. 

Adam:

Please do

David:

He says “in principle, yes” but he knows that principles are for sale. 

Adam:

Tell him no deal
We want his thoughts and emotions
Or nothing

David:

No deal. He keeps his emotions pretty private. 

Adam: 

Then his thoughts

David:

Feb 20 is too soon, I think. I’ve had a look at my schedule. I have so much to do here. 

Adam:

We go back a long way David.  Those chats you and I had did influence many of the key projects Olly and I made. Likewise, us publishing your first book, me introducing you to Michael Mack were important to you. 

Adam:

OK… last try… not even a few words? Literally just a soundbite?
I know it’s a big ask David but it’s a big moment
Please do this, life is short and these moments count
Let me know.
Love
Adam

David:

okok! (why all the pomp for this dissolution?)

Adam:

Thank you
It’s not pomp it’s a celebration and a ritual. I’ve spent 23 years of my life working with that man. It deserves some dignity and celebration. 

David: 

Well, a bang, not a whimper it be. 

Adam:

Are you happy for 1000 Words to publish your obit, D?

David:

I don’t know. I haven’t written it yet. Try not to let the tail of publicity do the wagging.

Adam:

David, You speak in riddles.
The separation of this partnership has been fucking gruelling and painful. It was 23 years of intense and beautiful collaboration. You know how much had to be negotiated between us and what a wrestle collaboration involves.  You also know the difference between our practices strutting, overconfident public performance and the very ordinary anxiety involved in the making of the work. I have asked a handful of people on the planet I love and who have influenced my work to put it to rest. Not to eulogise or publicise it but to put it to rest.
They have all been able to say yes or no. Just let me know.

David: 

Dearest Adam, 

This has been the obituary you wrote for Broomberg & Chanarin. I am happy to put my name to it.♦ 

Image courtesy the artists © Broomberg & Chanarin

The Late Estate of Broomberg & Chanarin at Fabra i Coats Contemporary Art Centre, Barcelona, 20 February – 23 May 2021. Curated by Joana Hurtado Matheu.

—
David Campany is a curator, writer and Managing Director of Programs at the International Center of Photography, New York.

Heba Y. Amin

When I see the future, I close my eyes

Exhibition review by Alessandro Merola

Alessandro Merola examines Heba Y. Amin’s investigation into the ubiquitous shadow of surveillance that prevails over the Middle East, giving rise to the fear of the skies above.

In 2013, an Egyptian fisherman spotted a stork with an electrical device, resembling a camera, strapped to its leg. Fearing Israeli tampering, he reported the bird to police officials and it was detained on suspicion of espionage. It later transpired that the “camera” was, in fact, a tracking instrument used by Hungarian zoologists researching the stork’s migratory habits. Foreign media outlets quickly reduced the episode into an absurdist spectacle, but there was something more profound at play; for no paranoia is borne out of thin air. From where, then, did such a paranoia – so consuming to trigger the conspiring against a “spy stork” – arise?

Almost one hundred years earlier, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George ordered Lord Allenby, Commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, to seize control of Jerusalem. Supposedly turning to God for guidance, Allenby found inspiration in Isaiah 31:5: “As birds flying, so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem; defending also he will deliver it; and passing over he will preserve it.” He launched planes over the city, instructing pilots to drop flyers demanding in Arabic: ‘Surrender the city today! Allenby.’ Yet unbeknown to the Commander, ‘Allenby’ can only be translated in one way: ‘Prophet’. The Turks, who were believers in the prophecy that their Holy City would not be lost until a man of Allah came to deliver it, surrendered without firing a shot. The campaign put an end to 400 years of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem, setting the foundations for modern Israel. Triumphant in his fulfilment of Biblical prophecy, Allenby returned to his villa in Cairo, eager to pose for the local press. However, he was not alone. By his side, he had a new companion: a “pet” marabou stork.

In her exhibition, When I see the future, I close my eyes at The Mosaic Rooms, London, Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin has drawn on this disquieting chain of events – bound by the avian augury – to trace the ubiquitous shadow of surveillance that prevailed over the Middle East thereafter, lending its skies an air of menace. On an upward-facing screen in the centre of the floor, Amin presents As Birds Flying (2016), a film splicing contemporary drone footage scanning contested territories with reconstructed audio sequences from Adel Emam’s political satire, Birds of Darkness (1995): “Is it your first time on top?” Towering on the opposite wall are the first aerial photographs taken of the Jordan Valley, Palestine (1900–20). Strategically framed as “untouched” landscapes by American Colony members, these images were subsequently sold to the British government and used to justify the very Galilean settlements as spied on in As Birds Flying. The dialogue between these various works reveals the ways in which such panoptic views from above – whether from a bird, plane, drone or God – can be deployed, beyond evidence, to push forward an ideological agenda. The language of imperialism is inscribed within the technology itself.

However, what is most unsettling perhaps about this collusion between bird biology and human machinery is its elision of the corporeal eye. Charting the osmosis between military and cinematic technologies within the context of aerial photography, philosopher Paul Virilo writes of the quite literal ‘deadly harmony’ that emerges when bombs and missiles are fitted with cameras and ‘open their eyes’.[i] These algorithmically-wired imaging machines, as Anthony Downey posits in the exhibition’s accompanying book, Heba Y. Amin: The General’s Stork (2020), have ushered in their own techno-aesthetic; a regime of viewing that topographically quarters the Middle East only ever as a site of ‘atavistic threat’, thus playing into a self-serving, neo-colonialist aspiration of unending war on terror.[ii] For this reconfiguration, and further securing, of the coloniser’s ‘imaginative command’[iii] over the colonised is a legacy of Orientalism in the digital age; a means of sustaining the West’s own vision of itself. Amin considers whether we can look down on these same landscapes today and extract the Oriental gaze embedded deep within.

In a bunker-like room downstairs, Amin redirects her focus from the sky to the sea. Across a table of lightboxes, archival documents – including engineering plans, maps and newspaper cut-outs – have been repurposed to plot the evolution of Atlantropa, a scheme devised by German architect Herman Sörgel to drain the Mediterranean Sea in order to suture Europe to Africa and construct a new ‘supercontinent’. Although dating back to the mid-19th century, when French officer François Roudaire proposed the diversion of the waters to push Arabs and Berbers south and open up trade with North Africa, Sörgel’s fantasy was embraced long after: Benito Mussolini declared he would ‘make the desert bloom’ by flooding the region, whilst Dwight D. Eisenhower, as leaked by a declassified CIA note, claimed the development of the Qattara Depression’s hydro-electrical potential would be ‘spectacular and peaceful’. Though Atlantropa was never realised, consistent were the ways in which this mercenary colonial project was redrafted, over and over, as an omnibenevolent unification of continents.

“Who were these megalomaniacal men who felt that [the Mediterranean] was theirs to control? Where does that entitlement come from, and what does it feel like?” These questions formed the basis of Amin’s Operation Sunken Sea (2018), which is projected onto the room’s rear wall. Stitching together broadcasted speeches by autocrats, from Nikita Khrushchev to Gamal Abdel Nasser, Amin unnervingly inserts herself in the centre as a quasi-dictator. She hijacks the grandiloquent rhetoric, gesturing and aesthetics employed by her predecessors, in turn satirising the staged elements of such modes of public address. However, pledging to feed the hungry, provide employment, end the migration crisis and pay reparations to Africa and the Middle East, Amin’s Mediterranean-draining proposal beckons a parallel era of human progress. Her blue-sky-thinking borders on the bizarre, but, upon learning her speech is mashed-up from actual quotes by fascists past and present, we are confronted by our own immunities to such masteries of the mechanics of propaganda.

Given that land-altering visions, as exemplified by China’s “New Silk Road”, Turkey’s Istanbul Canal and Saudi Arabia’s cross-border city Neom, have become alarmingly commonplace, Operation Sunken Sea scrutinises not only the continuation of techno-utopian – or indeed dystopian – imaginings, but also their normalisation through systems we are unable to think beyond. After all, stood at the podium, Amin finds herself complicit within a necropolitical logic – as internalised via the broadcasting apparatus – whilst asking: what happens when narratives are flipped by an African-Arab woman? One lightbox displays Sörgel’s portrait from Time alongside Amin’s own restaging of it (the latter now appearing after an Internet search of the German’s name), whilst another shows a map of the Mediterranean by the 10th century Persian geographer, Al-Istakhri. The water is rendered as positive space, and the surrounding land negative; a radical reversal of contemporary Euro-centric conceptions of the Mediterranean as a border impeding the movement of migrants from Africa.

Amin’s interest in tactics of subversion extends into the exhibition’s third body of work, Project Speak2Tweet (2011–ongoing). On 27 January 2011, three days after the Egyptian revolution began, the government put the Internet to sleep. In reaction, Google programmers developed @speak2tweet, an online rallying point in which citizens could dial in and post voicemails to Twitter through SMS. Amin has delved into this aural archive (no longer publicly accessible), juxtaposing the voicemails with video footage of Cairo’s failed architectural projects. The result is an elegiac and near-hallucinatory conjuring of the collective psyche of a people who were unplugged, yet not silenced. Here, their digital footprints are grounded within the urban realm, echoed by the room’s arresting steel bars on which the screens hang. “Please keep the flag flying for me when I’m gone,” records one protestor as he enters Tahir Square, not knowing if he would ever return. Amin’s ever-growing archive seeks to honour this wish; to ensure this slice of history does not disappear into the depths of cyberspace. What does it mean to listen to these voices ten years on? In light of the Egyptian state’s escalation of mass-surveillance and crackdowns on digital dissent during the pandemic leading to egregious spates of incarcerations, the symbolism of the bars is not lost.

In another voicemail, a woman addresses President Hosni Mubarak: “What would have happened if you gave up your greed? If you hadn’t listened to the voice of your devil? If you had invested in your children?” This speculative what if is at the heart of Amin’s When I see the future, I close my eyes (the exhibition title is a lyric taken from the song Excellent Birds which was co-written by Laurie Anderson and Peter Gabriel, first performed in 1984 as part of Nam June Paik’s international satellite “installation”, entitled Good Morning, Mr Orwell). With an eye towards our post-digital future, Amin asks: what if new technologies could, contra to Orwell’s 1984 (1949), indeed live up to their democratic potential? As one of her stork protagonists declares: “From now on, there is a new world.” What might this new world look like from above? Perhaps, Al-Istakhri’s rendition of the Mediterranean Sea, emblazoned on a flag that hangs outside the gallery front, speaks not only of what could have been, but also what could still be.♦

All images courtesy the artist and The Mosaic Rooms, London © Heba Y. Amin

Installation views of When I see the future, I close my eyes at The Mosaic Rooms, London from 1 October 2020 – TBC 2021. Photographs by Andy Stagg

—
Alessandro Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words.

References:

[i] Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (New York: Verso, 2009), p. 83.

[ii] Anthony Downey, “There’s Always Someone Looking at You: Performative Research and the Techno-Aesthetics of Drone Surveillance” in Heba Y. Amin: The General’s Stork, ed. Anthony Downey (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020), p. 11.

[iii] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 94.

Mark McKnight

Heaven is a Prison

Book review by Eugénie Shinkle

Eugénie Shinkle considers the ways Mark McKnight turns the distance of pornographic and landscape photography back on itself, grounding the gaze in the fleshy material of the body.

Earth and sky – and in between them, a horizon, suggested but not seen. The first two photographs in Mark McKnight’s Heaven is a Prison, published by Loose Joints, sketch out a landscape in elemental form, drawing the gaze skyward and then down again, to the ragged outline of a fallen tree against a backdrop of distant hills. In the third photograph, two figures occupy the middle distance, their bodies locked in an embrace, their skin smooth against the parched vegetation. The camera moves closer, glancing towards this intimate scene and looking away again in a steady rhythm that feels choreographed – the slow circling of a voyeur creeping through the grass. Set against the expanse of the surrounding landscape, the pair of figures seem almost incidental.

Soon enough, though, it becomes clear that these two male bodies, engaged in a raw act of lovemaking, are the subject of this work. As the camera draws nearer, the viewer is transformed from voyeur to participant, close enough to make out sweat and spit, hair and marks on the skin. But the faces of the two men are partially obscured, and their anonymity only serves to strengthen the intensity of the encounter. Is primal too strong a word? Maybe not. There’s something monumental about these two bodies, a vitality that they share with the landscape itself.

In the accompanying essay, poet and critic Garth Greenwell describes the landscape in McKnight’s photographs as a metaphor or an index of time passing, a backdrop for what is essentially a human drama. It is all of these things, but it’s also much more. The landscape is an insistent presence in Heaven is a Prison. Shots of clouds and rolling hills punctuate the story again and again: they are more than tangential, more than just a setting for the minor transgression of al fresco sex. In Western culture, a landscape view – not the ground, rock or water itself, but the pictorial order we impose upon it – is a manifestation of power. When we look out over a landscape, we do so, implicitly, from a place of safety: here, the place where I stand, is always set out in relation to the over there of the horizon. This distance privileges the rational eye and gives a known form to the shapelessness of unaltered nature.

It’s in his images of landscape that McKnight’s much-vaunted debt to photographic Modernism is most clearly felt: Frederick Sommer, Minor White, Ansel Adams – each put their own distinct spin on the Modernist archetype, and each has left a trace on McKnight’s practice. For Adams especially, the landscape was a theatrical space on which to stage the heroic expression of the self. Through his views – their classical structure bound to the Western landscape tradition – the rational gaze dominates space. McKnight’s landscapes hint at this ideal form, except for the fact that the horizon – the eye’s guarantee of detachment – is nearly always absent. For the viewer, this refusal of distance plays out as a kind of vulnerability: I can’t see, I can’t know, I can’t find myself.

Along with this loss of perspective comes an invitation – or perhaps an imperative – to surrender to sensation. There’s no shyness in McKnight’s depiction of sex, and the forthrightness of his photographs requires the viewer to navigate a powerful series of affects. There are moments of real tenderness in Heaven is a Prison, but there’s also hard fucking, chains and piss play – not glimpsed from a distance, but often, confrontationally close. The viscous stream of saliva running from one man’s mouth into his partner’s is exciting and disgusting in equal measure. It’s visceral stuff, and the exact nature of the sensations that we experience – shock, arousal, joy – is less important than the fact that they are so clearly summoned.

As viewers, we do not observe McKnight’s photographs from a place of safety. Instead, they meet the eye with acts so fiercely intimate that we are left with a stark choice: to be drawn in, or to look away. And if the earth, sky and empty pages interleaved with the more explicit scenes hint at a reprieve, what they really offer is a different kind of seduction – a slow, deliberate rhythm that lends these acts the solemnity of ritual. Looking through Heaven is a Prison is like witnessing an act of communion: earth, flesh and sky, merging into one another.

It’s telling that McKnight lists Sommer and White amongst his most significant influences. Both utilised elements of landscape in their work, but abandoned its spatial conventions in favour of something less secure, less easily knowable. Sommer’s Arizona Landscapes have no foreground or middle distance or horizon – nothing against which the viewing subject can measure themselves. For White, the abstract forms of water, clouds and other natural elements were ways of evoking a state of resonance or unity with the cosmos that surpassed rational knowledge. Both can be understood as invitations to unmake the self. McKnight’s work shares this sense of transport, this euphoric dissolution of boundaries – between one body and another, between the body and the landscape, between the look and its object.

Heaven is a Prison is a book about lust, desire and sadomasochistic sex, but it would be a mistake to label these photographs pornographic, just as it would be a mistake to label this a book of landscape photographs. As genres, pornography and landscape are crude articulations of a power that relies on distance – the privilege of a bodiless eye. McKnight’s photographs turn this distance back on itself, grounding the gaze in the fleshy material of the body. And if his work challenges archetypal images of queer bodies, it also touches on themes that are more ecumenical and potentially utopian: the idea that distance can coexist with closeness; that pain can be an avenue to pleasure and deeper intimacy; and that transcendence is a horizon that may only be approached by leaving a place of safety.♦

All images courtesy of the artist and Loose Joints © Mark McKnight

—
Eugénie Shinkle is a photographer and writer living in East London. She is co-editor (with Callum Beaney) of the photography platform C4 Journal. 

Clare Strand

The Discrete Channel with Noise

Essay by Duncan Wooldridge

Made of Porcelain Enamel on Steel, with a mechanical precision that belies their hand-painted fabrication, László Moholy-Nagy’s EM1, EM2, and EM3 (1923), often known as the Telephone Pictures, prophesied the role that new materials and new technologies would play in artmaking in the future. Created by calling a fabricator, giving instructions over the phone, with a grid and commonly defined reference materials, including colour charts, the work foretold a host of artistic strategies, including the delegation of work to other agents as well as the notion of the artwork as an ‘instruction’ or ‘piece of information’. Distant was the human hand, eliminated in the service of new technologies, though the marks of experimentation were nonetheless vivid, the work appearing strikingly industrial in comparison with the artist’s, and peers, other production of the time. Moholy-Nagy, who produced the Telephone Pictures a year after completing his equally significant essay Production-Reproduction, sought to use technology as a means to challenge what the artist described in his writing as a fundamentally ‘reproductive’ tendency within the art of the time: the production of formally and intellectually generic methods that reproduced the ways of seeing of the present and past. Moholy-Nagy was not critical of the artwork’s capacity to be made multiple, in fact celebrating technology and reproducibility; he was critical of art which reproduced conventions, a production he likened to little more than uncritical virtuosity.

Technology would unlock new methods of artmaking and new ways of seeing, Moholy-Nagy surmised. The significance of his images and writings are not lost, certainly not in artists’ use of the technological, but the calls that he made – to experiment with photography and to understand the technology that we use – certainly seems to have been rarely heeded. Clare Strand’s The Discrete Channel with Noise (2018), shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020, is a work which picks up systems and technologies of communication in order to treat them not as unspoken facts but as material. Beginning with the propositions of Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, it puts to the test the logics of systematised communication, through the photographic image, as it has moved from immanent image to complex object. Strand’s title is borrowed from the second section of Shannon’s groundbreaking 1948 essay A Mathematical Theory of Communication, republished as a book in collaboration with Warren Weaver the following year. Strand’s project – to remake a series of black and white photographs remotely, by painting from a series of instructions arrived at from a gridded original image, communicated to her across the English Channel whilst on a residency in Paris, shifts and reconfigures Moholy-Nagy’s propositions in important ways, addressing the ramifications of what he foresaw and Shannon made manifest. Strand’s strategies, as a result, play with and amend our relationships to technology, drawing comment on the information society and its digital swarms.

A 2010 work by Clare Strand, entitled The Seven Basic Propositions, pits seven 1950s Kodak slogans against the Google Image Search engine. For each claim made for photography by Kodak – to ‘authenticate’, ‘detail’, be ‘inexpensive’, be ‘colorful’ [sic], to ‘last’, to be ‘fast’, and to be ‘so expressive’ – Google throws back generic image after generic image. What is remarkable is not that the familiar search engine provides its own index or archive – or that it has a quantity-biased window onto the world that comes into stark relief when asked to perform semantic or qualitative tasks. It is that the images it supplies are so generic, so dominated by the banal, that claims to the romance or significance of technology come crashing down. Here Strand overtly ties together the question of production with that of distribution. The first of Strand’s works to overtly tackle forms of image circulation, The Seven Basic Propositions has led to an array of diverse works, which all speak about what is and is not made visible: Strand’s The Happenstance Generator (2015), Research in Motion (2014), Men Only Tower (2017), and Ragpicker’s Tower (2012), and her installation All That Hoopla (2016), all speak to how circulation happens, structures and limits.

The Discrete Channel with Noise begins with a circulating image. A small archive of 36 photographs collected by the artist – and coincidentally used in another work, The Entropy Pendulum and OutPut (2015) – formed the basis from which Strand’s husband selected 10 images which make up the final series. Across a number of Skype calls, between the artist’s home in Brighton and her temporary studio in Paris, each original photograph, cast into 2928 individual squares over a 48×61 grid, was communicated verbally using an agreed greyscale number code, with the artist painting each square onto large sheets of paper to recreate the images. Inverting Moholy-Nagy’s process, Strand is not the transmitter but the receiver; a receiver of chance and happenstance, she embraces and absorbs the accidental. Here, in what is in effect a human machine, Strand cedes control of selection – to test his method, Shannon identified that any ‘actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages’ so that the engineer must devise a system encompassing all possible messages – Strand works only with the information provided to her, which she must receive and transcode. In a playful take on the rise of video calling, the image is withheld, and described only across the call. What results are images that are recognisably photographic, lossy to our eyes, and bearing witness to moments of error or noise.

Across the series, we can recognise portraits and details, though the images – the precision and accuracy that we have come to expect – remains elusive. Our attention shifts repeatedly from pictorial subject to process and object. In a contrast to Moholy-Nagy’s Telephone Pictures, Strand’s hand is readily apparent on the surface of each painted image. Each square is painted, but brush marks and overlaps pepper the surface of the picture. In her first exhibition of The Discrete Channel with Noise, at Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France in Paris in 2018, Strand displayed, on a wall opposing the resulting Algorithmic Paintings, all aspects of the work’s process, including the original images and tubs containing 10 tones of paint in greyscale, as well as brushes to further emphasise the handmade construction of the project. On the first wall of the exhibition, Shannon’s diagram of ‘a general communication system’ is reproduced. From ‘Information Source’ to ‘Transmitter’, the diagram moves towards the ‘Receiver’ and its ‘Destination’. In its centre is a ‘Noise Source’. If Strand’s images show us the photograph compressed into its smallest parts, shaped into units, pieced together in correct and incorrect orders, the noise is unquestionably human. Hers is a deliberately manual adoption of Shannon’s method, stripped back to its basic principles. With the originary images, here each captioned as an Information Source, exhibited opposite to the resulting Algorithmic Painting – we are pointedly placed in the centre, a human in the machine. We do the work of recognising the image, and see its transmission, including its errors. Perhaps we can identify ourselves in fact as the central square in Shannon’s diagram, as the ‘Noise Source’. Are we reliable narrators, reflecting upon what we broadcast, and verifying the information we transmit? We might reflect on communication not as mechanical. A key concern of Strand’s is the culture of misdirection, snooping, and miscommunication that our contemporary technologies enable. From the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the ongoing and overt misinformation spread by Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, we are willing operators in a system that we know is distorting our messages, one that has also rendered us uncritical receivers at the very same time. Indeed, if the critique of the photograph’s claim to truth has led to transformations in how we conceive of the image, Strand’s project shows this to be vital also in not just the image or the text, but in the form, or channel, that we privilege. As John Roberts has pointed out in his study on photography in the present, Photography and Its Violations (2014), the human qualification that all forms of speech require in testimony, the embodying call ‘believe me’, should be applied to the photograph and to its delivery. We must return it to the object of a human producer, and show a willingness to put ourselves forward and become part of the image and its claims. We must not only show ourselves, we must find alternate systems for verification as recipients. If recent elections have told us anything, it is in the incredible influence that a partisan media can possess. The forms of broadcasting and transmission are not non-human. We are the human agents of these technological forms: we are its transmitters, noise sources, and receivers. We have the capacity to determine how information travels, and to whom it travels. ♦

The Discrete Channel with Noise is on display as part of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020 at The Photographers’ Gallery, London from 21 February 2020, with the winner announced on 14 May 2020.

Images courtesy the artist. © Clare Strand

Installation images from Photographique d’Ile-de-France courtesy the artist and Centre Pompidou. © Aurélien Mole

—
Duncan Wooldridge is an artist, writer and Course Director of Photography at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. He writes regularly for Artforum, Art Monthly and Elephant. In 2011 he curated the exhibition Anti-Photography at Focal Point Gallery, in 2014 John Hilliard: Not Black and White, at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, and in 2019 Moving The Image: Photography and its Actions.

Captions:

1-Schematic diagram of a general communication system from A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Shannon and Weaver, published by Bell Systems (1949)

2-Clare Strand, The Discrete Channel with Noise: Algorithmic Painting; Destination #3-8 

3-Clare Strand, The Discrete Channel with Noise: Algorithmic Painting; Destination #4-10 + The Discrete Channel with Noise: Information Source #4-10

4-Clare Strand, The Discrete Channel with Noise: Algorithmic Painting; Destination #7

5-Clare Strand, The Discrete Channel with Noise: Algorithmic Painting; Destination #4

6-Clare Strand, The Discrete Channel with Noise: Paint Brushes and Paint Pots

7-Clare Strand, The Discrete Channel with Noise: Paint Pots 1-10

8-Clare Strand, The Discrete Channel with Noise: Paint Pots (Detail) 

9-Clare Strand, The Discrete Channel with Noise: Paint Brushes (Detail) 

10-Clare Strand, The Discrete Channel with Noise: Paint Brushes (Detail) 

11-Clare Strand, The Discrete Channel with Noise: Information Source #4-10

12-Clare Strand, The Discrete Channel with Noise: Information Source #6

13-Clare Strand, The Discrete Channel with Noise: Information Source #3

14-Clare Strand, The Discrete Channel with Noise: Information Source #7

Liz Orton

Every Body Is An Archive

Book review by Diane Smyth

When Liz Orton’s daughter was 13 months old, she had to have a nuclear imaging scan at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital. Though it’s a hospital famous for its work with children, and though Orton was assured that the scan would be non-invasive, the procedure turned out to be traumatic. Injected with a dye, her daughter had to be kept motionless for about 20 minutes, something very difficult for most wriggly toddlers to achieve. So she was strapped to the bed with Velcro restraints and immobilised with sandbags, which felt, says Orton, anything but non-invasive.

The experience got her thinking about medical imaging and the ‘medical gaze’, setting her off on a very long path which has now culminated in a book, Every Body Is An Archive, designed by Valentina Abenavoli of AKINA. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, Orton realised the project from 2014-19, working with the medical imaging team at University College London Hospital, sitting in as scans were taken of patients, teaching herself to use medical imaging software, doing collaborative re-enactments with individuals who’d had scans, and plundering the photographs in the Clark’s Positioning in Radiography manual (1939). Every Body Is An Archive includes essays by John Hipwell, computational medical imaging scientist; Professor Steve Halligan, radiologist at UCL Hospital and Head of the Centre for Medical Imaging at UCL; plus Dr Henrietta Simson, artist and fine art lecturer, and throughout, Orton aims to do something deceptively simple – to unpick the medical gaze.

As a term first proposed by Michel Foucault in his 1963 book The Birth of the Clinic, it refers to the dehumanising medical separation of the patient’s body from his or her person or identity. At the hands of the medical profession, so the argument goes, we’re supposed to abandon our cultural, sexual, or personal understanding of our bodies and think of them as medical objects; if we’re the only naked ones in the room, this isn’t supposed to feel strange, and if we’re touched in intimate places, we’re supposed to take it on the chin. “Paradoxically, in relation to that which he is suffering from, the patient is only an external fact; the medical reading must take him into account only to place him in parentheses. Of course, the doctor must know ‘the internal structure of our bodies’; but only in order to subtract it, and to free to the doctor’s gaze ‘the nature and combination of symptoms, crises, and other circumstances that accompany diseases’,” writes Foucault. Later he adds: “If one wishes to know the illness from which he is suffering, one must subtract the individual, with his particular qualities”. But as Orton points out, we don’t have different cultural, personal or medical bodies, we have just one, so in real life, this separation isn’t easy to achieve. Orton’s book is a deliberate refusal to try.

The images she uses from Clark’s Positioning in Radiography are meant to be diagrams, for example, helping professionals achieve the best results in their X-rays; Orton strips them of their context to show how surreal, kinky, and even fashionable they also are. Legs are placed akimbo, faces crudely bisected by lines in ways that cut across social norms for (female) bodies and the ways they’re represented; elsewhere computer-generated images create weirdly inhuman depictions of the human body. The re-enactments she staged, meanwhile, reinterpret the sometimes disempowering experience of being scanned to give back a sense of autonomy and control, to show scenes that look loving, threatening and even funny.

Orton’s book is also peppered with short phrases from those who have undergone scans, as they try to describe the images that have been taken of their insides. Patients often don’t get to see these images, Orton points out, and if they do, they usually lack the skills or the vocabulary to interpret them in conventional, medical terms. She lets them give it a go, and their homespun attempts are also surreal and witty, and heavily reliant on metaphor. “when you are poaching an egg, and the egg is a bit old, and all the white goes into the water”, reads one; “a ghost waiting for an embrace”, reads another.

For Orton, it’s the fact that these interior shots are just that, interior, that’s so compelling – taken without physically puncturing the body but invading it all the same. It’s an approach that she deliberately eschewed, teaching herself to use radiological software but using it to build pictures of the outsides of bodies rather than breaching their boundaries. As such many of the resulting images are clustered together onto black pages in the book, where they’re printed with silver ink like X-rays. They look descriptive but also eerily strange, artefacts and interferences giving a distinctly digital effect.

And that’s of interest too since, as Orton points out, the medical body is now on the threshold of change, as computer sciences become more integral to healthcare. Medical images, for some time captured by computers, are increasingly interpreted by computers too – and unlike older forms of diagnosis, in which a doctor might talk with a patient about their symptoms and also their life, the patient need not even be present. Furthermore the image data sets are valuable too, both helping to train up the interpretative software but also as a resource in their own right, one that is governed by strict rules around privacy and ethics but, even so, one prominent radiologist has spoken in terms of a ‘gold rush’. In the era of Big Data, it’s worth considering what that data might reveal in conjunction with other information sets, and also about who owns them – medical imaging is a force for good, but considered as a means of surveillance, it’s at least got the potential for something less benign.

“Computer software and hardware systems operating across different sectors, through common platforms and constantly expanding networks, allow for an unprecedented integration of interests and systems in medicine,” Orton has written on her Digital Insides website. “The body is becoming part of this new informational economy, facilitated through new forms of biomedical management. It is being propelled into the fields of medical image computing, post-image processing, computer aided diagnosis, automated analysis, image-guided surgery/treatment, machine and deep learning, and image mining. The image is potential: in a computerised system, it is becoming generative in new ways, both as product and process.”

Or, as Professor Steve Halligan puts it in his accompanying essay to the book: “Ultimately, [the] work shows us what we have often forgotten due to pressure of work and what is obscured: that there is first and foremost a human being behind the image, and secondly that the experience of imaging often makes patients feel highly vulnerable.” ♦

All images courtesy the artist. © Liz Orton

—
Diane Smyth is a freelance journalist who works with publications such as The Guardian, The Observer, The FT Weekend Magazine, Creative Review, The Calvert Journal, the British Journal of Photography, Foam, and others. Prior to going freelance she wrote and edited for the British Journal of Photography for more than 15 years, and she has also curated exhibitions for The Photographers’ Gallery, Lianzhou Foto Festival and the Flash Forward Festival.

Kalen Na’il Roach

My Dad Without Everybody Else

Essay by Taous R. Dahmani

Looking at Kalen Na’il Roach’s images is an engaging and intriguing experience. At first, they appear like humble bits and pieces of photography, mundane family photographs displaying the proudest moments in life: sport and school achievements, games with friends and family gatherings. Beyond these initial thoughts, their materiality and complex texture indicate wilful acts of vandalism; conscious scrapes and iterative scratches, scribbles in a diary. Jacqueline Woodson’s 1995 publication Autobiography of a Family Photo (and its nifty title) then comes to mind and seems to perfectly condense Na’il Roach’s endeavour. Born in 1992 in Washington, DC, in a split up family, a “partial only child” as he phrases it, Kalen Na’il Roach started using family archival imagery — found in the bag of the Polaroid 600 SE his dad gave him — for his series This Is and This Isn’t My Family. He eventually continued to gather photographs from different family members that then became his source material.

Ineluctably, Kalen Na’il Roach’s work falls within a long legacy of conceptualising how we should think about the relationship between family and photography in African American communities as embodied by the writings of Tina M. Campt or Christina Sharpe. Within this context, photography then becomes central, as stated by Gloria Jean Watkins — better known by her pen name bell hooks — in her essay In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life: “Cameras gave to black folks, irrespective of class, a means by which we could participate fully in the production of images.” In the same text, the author used a photograph of her father, Veodis Watkins, to initiate an in-depth investigation of the links between family photography and its place within African American culture. She described the unique bond to an image of a father that she only half-recognised; the attachment to certain photographs according to one’s place in the family and the mixed feelings these pictorial genealogies can generate beyond the moments pictured. In turn, Kalen Na’il Roach uses his family’s photographic archives as a way of telling his family’s story from his own vantage point, going as far as inserting himself in the narration through appropriation and alteration. Photographs then become tangible bases for the creation of personal histories, and Na’il Roach admits to his critical intervention as “acts of protection, adornment, desecration, correction, concealment, exposition, and so on.”

While many photographers have been involved in projects related to genealogy and filiation — one could think of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s The Notion of Family, to name but one — I would like to argue that we are now witnessing in current, family related, photographic practices a “haptic turn”, that is the physical transformation inflicted on family photographs, leaving the rough and beautiful modifications, to be seen by all. Therefore, it is the adoption and amendment of photographs of family members which particularly interests me in this essay. How, from a few images found in boxes, in dusty albums or on the walls of grandparents, artists and photographers decide to tell their story. The development of a DIY aesthetic, a cut and mix materiality, the alteration of the photographic surface — like an updated resurgence of 19th century Pictorialism — creates a very intimate and direct relationship, firstly between the family archive and the author, then between the final crafted photograph and the spectator. The manipulation of the image strengthens the awareness of touch, a sense of confidentiality and intimacy, multiplying its haptic specificity. I am, for example thinking, of Lebohang Kganye’s 2016 Reconstruction of a Family, Priya Kambli’s series started in 2015 and ongoing project Mami (Uncle’s Wife) and Karl Ohiri’s 2013 How to Mend A Broken Heart. In his series, My Dad Without Everybody Else Kalen Na’il Roach draws, scratches, drip paints, blackens, smudges photographs of his father as a child, a boy and a young man. By doing this Na’il Roach covers up backgrounds and other individuals depicted, highlighting a dedication to the photographic representation of his father. My Dad Without Everybody Else was born out of a process of reconciliation between a loving father, who inspired his son even if away from the household and generated by the messy phenomenon of getting to know a parent as an individual. As Na’il Roach’s father passed away in 2017, the meaning of the series inevitably got changed and seem now to also address grief. Kalen Na’il Roach’s haptic practice resonates as a personal ‘‘contact zone’’ to quote Mary Louise Pratt, an encounter between a charismatic father and a son in need of appreciation. Therefore Kalen Na’il Roach’s work turns into an exercise of power over family histories. Na’il Roach’s appropriation of these ‘‘home made photographs’’, as Richard Chalfen outs it, makes them become objects of self-study or even therapy.

Na’il Roach grew up in an artistic family, his mother’s father was a painter and his father a creative wage earner who used photography to earn an honest penny, and it seems that these resourceful and imaginative role models somehow enabled Na’il Roach to subvert assumed norms. My Dad Without Everybody Else is a poetic dialogue that goes against hegemonic understanding of fatherhood and masculinity. In her 2003 book We Real Cool, Black Men & Masculinity, bell hooks wrote: “Like all men, black men in patriarchal culture have not been raised to be intimate.” Kalen Na’il Roach countered such assumptions as he displayed wounds, pains and fears in order to create a body of work embedded in an alternative perspective and a deconstructed monolithic masculinity.

Beyond such considerations, My Dad Without Everybody Else encloses multiple layers of hidden context that so-called “happy images” such as family photographs don’t care to narrate. Concealed within family stories, dramas are often looked at unknowingly by the spectator.  Twice in the series, Na’il Roach uses the same photograph of his father, as a young teenager, playing basketball and going for a layup. Over and over again team-mates are obliterated, their identity hidden. For an outsider to the family, joy and carelessness emanate from the photograph, for an insider, Lorton Prison in Virginia and its basketball court on family day can be identified. The only one of the brothers not to go to prison, this photograph simultaneously becomes highly painful and highly political. Such a tale unlocks other layers of understanding. Indeed, according to the Sentencing Project, today, people of colour make up 37% of the U.S population but 67% of the prison population. If political bias does not seem to be at the heart of Na’il Roach’s work, it undeniably hovers over some of his images. Born in the early 1960s, Na’il Roach’s father grew up in the 1970s and 1980s at a time when some men fought against stigma and racism by paying particular attention to their looks. Decades later, his apparel and by extension Na’il Roach’s project emphasise the complexity of North American society: one the one hand embodying the American Dream through wearing sport jerseys and baseball glove while on the other embodying the codes of Black Dandyism via a white fur coat and a dapper, striped suit. ♦

Images courtesy the artist. © Kalen Na’il Roach

My Dad Without Everybody Else will be on display in the exhibition Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery from 20 February 2020 – 17 May 2020. The exhibition will then tour to Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles from 29 June – 20 September 2020 and Gropius-Bau, Berlin from 16 October 2020 until 10 January 2021. Prestel publish Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, edited by Alona Pardo, to accompany the exhibition.

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Taous R. Dahmani is a photography historian, working between Paris and London. She is a PhD fellow at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University Paris, where she teaches 20th century photography history. In 2019-20, Taous will be a researcher attached to the Maison Française in Oxford. Her thesis project is built around the representation of struggles and the struggle for representation. Her writings and her talks always tackle politics and its relations to the photographic medium.