Category: 36

Lisa Sorgini

Behind Glass

Essay by Catlin Langford

Currently on display at Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) in Melbourne/Naarm, Lisa Sorgini’s Behind Glass is a pandemic project comprising family portraits marked by art historical readings and an attempt to provoke discussion on the lack of awareness surrounding the relationships between children and mothers, as well as a wider misunderstanding concerning the messy realities of mothering and care, argues Catlin Langford.

A woman is seated, knees jutting forward. Her flesh compresses on the seat, a small, hollow dimple appearing on her left leg. Her face is obscured; hidden behind the naked baby she holds upwards, the child’s small foot skimming her upper thigh, and a hazy image of a cloudy blue sky and distant palm trees which falls across the woman’s face.

This layered imagery signals the driving concept informing Lisa Sorgini’s Behind Glass, a project comprising over 20 portraits of family groupings. Each work in the series was photographed through windows, or rather “behind glass”. The images reflected in the window glass become further characters in the portraits. It is multi-functional, serving as both a distinct aesthetic device, producing layered, painterly images, but also drawing attention to the unique circumstances under which the series was produced.

Behind Glass was conceived during the pandemic. Whilst social structures were significantly altered in this period of upheaval, mothers still found themselves undertaking most of the caring duties and were shouldered with even further responsibilities when other systems, like schooling, were not in place. Sorgini, at home with her two children and unable to work, responded to this personally and sought to document and reflect on the strange culture of parenting and care during the pandemic.

Created during the pandemic, Behind Glass was also held back by the pandemic. Its current showing at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) in Melbourne/Naarm is the first exhibition of the series in Australia. The images speak to both the collective and individual experience of the pandemic and undoubtedly resonate with the Melbourne population who were witness to a widely publicised ‘world’s longest lockdown’.[1] Sorgini is based in Bundjalung Country, in northern New South Wales. Like most of Australia, at some point this area was under stay-at-home orders, movement restricted to a five-kilometre radius. Complying with these rules, Sorgini sourced subjects within this perimeter via friends, neighbours or connections through contacts and social media. At their homes, she would direct her subjects via telephone or speaking through the glass, her six-month-old son sometimes strapped to her body as she photographed.

There is a naturalness to the photographs that one would not assume based on the circumstances of their creation and reveals Sorgini inherent understanding of her subjects. But there is also a theatricality, the works recalling art historical compositions. The scenes depicted are adorned in a golden light, a warmth permeating throughout the series. The light lifts the subjects, giving the everyday scenes a sense of grandeur. The presence of the windows serves as a framing device, recalling the presentation of artworks in galleries. It also evokes the Trompe-l’œil trickery of Northern Renaissance paintings, the frame painted into the image, questioning the audience’s conception of image versus reality. In Sorgini’s work, we are audience to two realities: the private interior world of the subject, shown through the window, and the exterior realities reflected in the glass. We capture glimpses, objects and scenes of interior domesticity, which contrast the outside expanse of forests, gardens or open blue skies. Whilst this outside world was off-limits to many during the pandemic, for mothers, leaving home can be difficult under the weight of responsibilities and the, at times, isolating and trapping experience of new motherhood. 

The present exhibition of Behind Glass at CCP draws attention to possible art historical readings. Photographs are grouped to encourage viewers to read and reflect on artistic depictions of the baby Jesus, the Three Graces and memento mori still lives. A secondary grouping depicts women nursing their infant children. Learned cultural understandings encourages a comparison to the Madonna and Child. But the mothers’ faces are obscured, hidden whilst in the midst of enacting caring duties.

This is a subtle signal to Sorgini’s wider concerns for the series and the themes embedded in her artistic practice. Sorigini is interested in the often-unacknowledged and unseen care given by mothers; a care that is widely accepted and expected, if unrecognised and unappreciated. In her exploration of care, Sorgini also considers the transferral and evolution of care and how it manifests in a variety of situations. In one work, a middle-aged woman looks out the window. Beside her, an elderly woman is seated, her unfocused gaze directed towards the viewer. The relationship between mother and daughter has altered, shifted and now swapped.

In curating the show, we discussed Sorgini’s recent travels to Italy and her experiences there of viewing works, including Renaissance paintings, in churches and galleries. We wanted to capture some sense of this experience, and the works have been purposefully shifted to above centre-line so the viewer must gaze upwards. This imbues the subjects with a greater sense of importance, as the role of care should be given, and further underlines their comparison to masterpiece artworks.

Such reverence is particularly notable given the unflinching honesty of the images. While expressing deep love and tenderness towards their family, the mothers appear tired in their role as central caregiver and provider. Interactions largely seem to be based on touch and need – grabbing, suckling, holding, supporting – an amalgamation of limbs and flesh. Flesh is a central motif, and Sorgini recognises and records the distinct changes which occur to the body during and following birth, and the caring duties which follow. The body wears the scars of such change, from stretch marks to ageing skin.

At a panel with fellow exhibiting artists Ying Ang and Odette England, Sorgini spoke of the misunderstandings surrounding her work and the tendency for the images to be viewed sexually, related to the depiction of flesh and touch. A discussion ensued on the lack of awareness surrounding the relationships between children and mothers, as well as a wider misunderstanding concerning the messy realities of mothering and care.

Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood curated by Susan Bright was first exhibited in 2013 at the Foundling Museum, in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery, London. The exhibition sought to challenge stereotypes and sentimental views of motherhood, pursuing a depiction which was candid and revealing. In the decade since, honest revelations around motherhood remain relatively rare, and can ignite endless criticisms, their voices heightened in the age of social media. There is still much work to be done in centring, envisioning and reflecting the stories and experiences of motherhood, mothering and care, as is central to Sorgini’s practice. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and the Centre for Contemporary Photography © Lisa Sorgini

Installation views of Behind Glass at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Melbourne/Naarm until 9 April 2023. Photographs by Hannah Nikkelson. In a collaboration between the CCP and the V&A’s Women in Photography project, there will be a panel discussion with Ying Ang, Odette England and Lisa Sorgini, chaired by Susan Bright, on 5 April.

—
Catlin Langford is curator at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne/Naarm. She has previously held positions at the V&A, Royal College of Art and Royal Collection Trust. She will be undertaking a fellowship at Cité internationale des arts, Paris in spring 2023 to continue her research on autochromes. 

Images:

1-Hannah and Ochre in the dining room, Clunes © Lisa Sorgini

2-Leah and Ethan in the bedroom #2, Pottsville © Lisa Sorgini

3-Jules and Alby in the dining room, St Helena © Lisa Sorgini

4-Amelia and Una in the dining room © Lisa Sorgini

5-Sarah and Ellaine in the living room, South Golden Beach © Lisa Sorgini

6-Beck with Matilda and Indigo at the front door #2, Mullumbimby © Lisa Sorgini

7-Hannah and Ochre in the dining room, Clunes © Lisa Sorgini

8-Abigail and Marigold in the kitchen #2, Federal © Lisa Sorgini

9-Installation ‘Behind Glass’ at Centre for Contemporary Photography © CCP/Hannah Nikkelson

10-Installation ‘Behind Glass’ at Centre for Contemporary Photography © CCP/Hannah Nikkelson       

References:

[1] Calla Wahlquist, “How Melbourne’s ‘short, sharp’ Covid lockdowns became the longest in the world”, The Guardian, 2 October 2021.

Gideon Mendel

Fire/Flood

Essay by Conohar Scott

Conohar Scott posits that Gideon Mendel’s outdoor exhibition at the Soho Photography Quarter provides a much-needed counterpoint to the iridescent spectacle of the solitary iceberg, which, upon further observation, is divorced from the broader socio-ecological context of climate change.

Photographs of icebergs have become synonymous with the visual representation of climate change. Over the course of the last two decades, numerous photographers have travelled to Greenland, or to the Antarctic ice sheets, in the hope of saying something about the looming threat posed by global heating. A notable exponent of this genre of photography is the German photographer Olaf Otto Becker, who has been documenting the melting of the Greenland ice cap since 2003. However, a quick image search on Google for the term “iceberg” will locate any amount of desktop wallpaper or stock photographs that depict these glassy cathedrals, cast adrift upon the open seas. In instances when the iceberg does not appear as snow white, it occupies the frame like a tremendous rough-hewn semi-precious stone. In such cases, the refraction of light produces rich hues of emerald green or periwinkle blue, which often appear at odds with the desultory grey of wintry sky and sea. Whilst artists like Becker lay claim to the unique power of photography to document the changing world of the Anthropocene with seeming neutrality, in truth, the ideological edifice of the iceberg comes fully loaded with a host of cultural signifiers that lurk beneath the surface.

Iceberg photography can be understood as a form of neo-Luminism, translated into contemporary photographic praxis. As such, its origins can be traced back to 19th century painters from the US such as Frederic Edwin Church. Travelling with his companion, the pastor Louis Legrand Noble, to paint The Icebergs (1861) off the coast of Nova Scotia, the clergyman’s diaries recall the painter’s religious veneration during his encounter, which is couched in the language of the Kantian sublime. Negative emotions such as fear and dread are surpassed only by a keen appreciation for the gothic majesty of the scene. In Church’s composition, such intense emotions are conveyed by a towering repoussoir of ice, which extends far beyond the confines of the frame to the left. Here, glacial shards are rendered by Church with an opalescence that is intended to signify God’s immanence in nature. However, when it comes to depicting the imminent threat of climate change, symbolism of this kind is problematic. This is because the aesthetic of neo-Luminism echoes the anthropocentrism of a post-Enlightenment worldview, which is deeply embedded within Cartesian dualistic notions of “Nature vs. Culture”, and is out of step with contemporary environmental discourse.

In her book Women’s Liberation and the Sublime (2006), the eco-feminist scholar Bonnie Mann argues that Kant’s notion of the sublime serves to advance masculine preoccupations with power and territorial dominance, which historically has subjugated women, racial and ethnic groups, as well as non-human beings from their rightful status as subjects to a subordinate status as objects. For Mann, the triumph of reason over nature during the encounter functions like a mirror, allowing the masculine subject ‘to experience his own might and magnitude as sublime’.[1] This observation leads the critic to conclude that male gendered preoccupations with power and dominance emanating from the sublime are antagonistic to an eco-feminist perspective, which privileges alternate values such as heterogeneity, solidarity and collaboration between constituent subjects. Moreover, in the writings of Enlightenment scholars such as Kant, Hegel and Hume, Mann observes that terms such as “reason” and “civilisation” are often employed as shorthand for the superiority of white Western culture, whilst, conversely, non-white peoples from other parts of the globe are characterised as backwards or primitive. Taking Mann’s eco-feminist viewpoint into consideration, it is worthwhile questioning if the leitmotif of the iceberg as an indexical sign for climate change succeeds in reproducing existent racial inequalities by privileging an aesthetic of whiteness.

When it comes to photographs of climate change, the waters urgently need to be muddied. It is well known that climate change is also a problem of racial justice; in poorer regions of the world such as North Africa or South Asia, brown and black skinned individuals are some of the most climate-vulnerable people on earth, although they contribute least to global heating emissions [2]. Even within wealthier nations, non-Caucasian communities are more likely to be exposed to environmental pollutants, and extreme weather events such as floods, than their white counterparts. Given the profound challenges that lie ahead, if the possibility of runaway climate change and a hothouse planet is to be avoided, it is crucial that photographers begin to place greater importance on images that address the global inequalities of climate change. Thankfully, the newly established exterior space in London’s Soho Photography Quarter, which belongs to The Photographers’ Gallery, has undertaken such a task with the opening of Gideon Mendel’s exhibition Fire/Flood. In particular, the artist’s Submerged Portraits provides a much-needed counterpoint to the iridescent spectacle of the solitary iceberg, which, upon further observation, appears divorced from the broader socio-ecological context of climate change.

Part of his ongoing series Drowned World, Mendel’s photographs on display here document the destruction caused by flash flooding events, which can be attributed to rising sea levels and extreme weather patterns caused by global heating. By combining examples from post-colonial countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh with locations in the developed world such as the UK, US and France, Mendel succeeds in addressing some of the racial and gender inequalities that Mann raises in her criticism of the Kantian sublime. On each occasion, the photographer accompanies his subjects into the foul waters which have recently engulfed their homes. Due to his use of a medium format Rolleiflex camera, Mendel’s square prints exude a sense of intimacy, which stands in stark contrast to the neo-Luminism of iceberg photographs. Whether it be in the flooded valleys of South Yorkshire or India’s disputed territory of Kashmir, Mendel approaches his subjects with an underlying assumption of their essential democratic equality; and in what must be the most heart-breaking of moments, they respond in kind by announcing their pride and defiance. It is fitting then that such personal experiences of tragedy are displayed publicly in the streets of Soho for passers-by to see. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery, London © Gideon Mendel

Installation views of Fire/Flood at Soho Photography Quarter until 31 March 2023. Photographs by Crispin Hughes

—
Dr. Conohar Scott is a Senior Lecturer in photographic theory and a practicing artist in the University of Lincoln, UK. His research interests concern the representation of industrial pollution in photography, and the application of art as a tool for environmental advocacy. Scott is the author of Photography and Environmental Activism: Visualising the Struggle against Industrial Pollution (Routledge, 2022).   

References:

[1] Bonnie Mann, Women’s Liberation, and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (Oxford University Press, 2006) p. 46.

[2] Arthur Baker and Ian Mitchell, “How Would Rapid Growth in the Poorest Countries Affect Global Carbon Emissions” (Center for Global Development, 2020) available at cgdev.org/blog/how-would-rapid-growth-poorest-countries-affect-global-carbon-emissions

Images:

1-‘Florence Abraham, Igbogene, Bayelsa State, Nigeria, November 2012’ from the series Drowning World © Gideon Mendel

2-‘Amjad Ali Laghari, Goth Bawal Khan village, Sindh Province, Pakistan, September 2022’ from the series Drowning World © Gideon Mendel

3-‘Abdul Ghafoor, Mohd Yousof Naich School, Sindh Province, Pakistan, October 2022’ from the series Drowning World © Gideon Mendel

4-‘Joy Christian, Balyesa State, Nigeria, November 2022’ from the series Drowning World © Gideon Mendel

5-‘João Pereira de Araújo, Taquari District, Rio Branco, Brazil, March 2015’ from the series Drowning World © Gideon Mendel

6-‘Nigeria, November 2022’ from the series Drowning World © Gideon Mendel

7-‘Gurjeet Dhanoa, Rock Creek, Superior, Colorado, US, March 2022’ from the series Burning World © Gideon Mendel

8-‘Uncle Noel Butler and Trish Butler, Nura Gunyu Indigenous Education Centre, New South Wales, Australia, 28 February 2020’ from the series Burning World © Gideon Mendel

9-‘Rhonda Rossbach, Derek Briem and Autumn Briem, Killiney Beach, British Columbia, Canada, 16 October 2021’ from the series Burning World © Gideon Mendel

10>12-Installation views of Fire/Blood, Soho Photography Quarter. Photographs by Crispin Hughes

Laia Abril

On Rape: And Institutional Failure

Book review by Jilke Golbach

On Rape: And Institutional Failure, Laia Abril’s latest instalment in her ongoing History of Misogyny, uses text and image to offer a carefully orchestrated, rigorously executed journey of photographic investigation into the omnipresent threat of rape, and violence against women in broader terms, writes Jilke Golbach. The Catalan artist currently presents her broad-ranging, research-based work at C/O Berlin until 21 May 2024.

Disbelief. It leaks from the pages of Laia Abril’s book On Rape: And Institutional Failure, published by Dewi Lewis, lingering in the air like a horrid smell. Disbelief, not because the countless stories of rape recorded here are unfamiliar (hardly so) or the facts fail to be loud enough, but because they lay bare, page after page, the nauseating extent to which practices, materialities and cultures of rape pervade societies whilst rape victims continue to be discredited and disputed.

An involuntary question, close to denial, keeps popping into my head as I process the most archaic, most barbaric forms of sexual abuse and silencing made visible here: surely, not still? To which the answer is: yes, still. And all the time, everywhere.

The day I write this, accounts of rape emerge from war-torn Ukraine, the London metropolitan police and Iran where, horrifyingly, virgins “must” be raped – in the name of religion – before being executed for protesting in the streets. If Abril’s project makes one thing clear, it is that rape, and violence against women in broader terms, is an omnipresent threat, not confined to borders or circumstances, and one which is to a great extent internalised by 51% of the global population. A frightening UN statistic asserts that as many as ‘one in three women will suffer domestic or sexual violence in their lifetime’.

Covered in bloodred cloth and printed on ink-black paper, this latest chapter of Abril’s ongoing History of Misogyny is a carefully orchestrated, rigorously executed journey of photographic investigation. It was sparked by the Manada, or Wolfpack, story in Spain, Abril’s country of birth: a widely publicised case of the gang rape of an 18-year-old woman in 2016 that mirrors many of the issues Abril uncovers: extreme brutality against women, video-recordings of rape, toxic masculinity, victim-blaming, questions of evidence and consent and a lack of justice for survivors – but also glimmers of hope in the form of feminist protests, the reform of sexual assault laws and ultimately increased sentencing for perpetrators.

‘Why do we still have a society that rapes?’ asks Abril in a conversation with Joanna Bourke, author of Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence (2022); a crucial, momentous question that drives the project. Through image and text, Abril seeks answers, all the while unravelling a web of myths and misconceptions, tracing the ancient and historic roots of present-day narratives about women, women’s bodies and what can be done to them. There is the persistent myth of the ‘broken hymen’, the ‘two-finger test’ to assert ‘vaginal tightness’, the fable that rape eroticises women and the excuse that ‘boys will be boys’.

Rape does not only happen to women and girls, but they do constitute the vast majority of victims. The crux of On Rape, following Abortion (2016) and preceding Mass Hysteria, resides in its powerful subtitle: institutional failure. Integrating materials ranging from biblical maps to WhatsApp groups, the work demonstrates that rape is systemic; symptomatic of patriarchal cultures in which male bodies can be weaponised and female bodies subordinated. Rape finds fertile ground in unequal societies and their long male-dominated institutions, where gender violence intersects with class, race and sexual orientation. ‘For centuries, men have made the rules’, notes Bourke, and our laws (as well as criminal and medical protocols) thus fail to protect women. Rape, domestic abuse, murder and forms of institutional misogyny are all leaves from the same book of gender violence.

Nowhere does this become more obvious than in Abril’s testimonies of survivors of rapes which took place in institutional settings (school, the army, a convent), presented alongside black-and-white photographs of the victims’ items of clothing. Modest on the page but displayed life-size in gallery contexts, as the recent Photoworks / V&A Parasol Foundation Women in Photography Project exhibition at London’s Copeland Gallery demonstrated, these forensic-feeling images leave the viewer in no doubt about the confrontation with a real human body.

Rape constitutes bodily harm, but its most grievous effects are the result of psychological trauma; trauma that might cause a lifetime of suffering or may be perpetuated over time, even becoming transgenerational by causing pregnancy or taking place within marriage. In the words of Lluïsa Garcia-Esteve, a doctor of psychiatry specialised in women’s mental health, the trauma of sexual violence constitutes ‘a crack, a rupture in the biography’.

This rupture, Abril shows, has long been pitted as a kind of robbery, as stolen virtue, lost purity; rooted in patriarchal conceptions of women as property. In many societies, rape victims are punished or even killed for bringing ‘disgrace’ to their communities. In certain places, marry-your-rapist laws continue to be legally practised. And yet, only a few years ago, two women in India had their hair shaved off for having the guts to resist a sexual assault by a group of men.

Guilt and shame are powerfully intertwined with sexual abuse and often coerce women into silence. Victim-blaming and victim-shaming are amongst the main reasons why most rapes do not get reported, let alone convicted. On Rape documents a dizzying array of excuses that seek to discredit or delegitimise those who speak out against rape, many of which are so ridiculously mad they’d be laughable if it was not for such a deadly serious subject: ‘If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down’… ‘If you wouldn’t have been there that night, none of this would have happened to you’. She had to be corrected for being a lesbian. She was wearing a lace thong. She had a few drinks. She had her eyes closed.

Silencing women is integral to rape culture. In The Mother of All Questions (2017), Rebecca Solnit writes how it maintains that ‘women’s testimony is worthless, untrustworthy… that the victim has no rights, no value, is not an equal’. And thus, ‘[h]aving a voice is crucial. It’s not all there is to human rights, but it’s central to them, and so you can consider the history of women’s rights and lack of rights as a history of silence and breaking silence.’

Abril follows in a lineage of women artists chipping away at the silence over sexual violence, alongside Zanele Muholi, Ana Mendieta, Tracey Emin, Kara Walker and Margaret Harrison. This work – to make public, to make visible, to make literal, to make undeniable – is an act of resistance, a refusal to cower in the face of oppression and control. On Rape’s remarkable power (and empowerment) resides in accumulation: by laying down the facts, counting the numbers, assembling the pieces, Abril has built a fortress of voices, and it leaves no space for disbelief. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis © Laia Abril

Laia Abril: On Rape – And Institutional Failure now runs at C/O Berlin until 21 May 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-‘Ala Kachuu’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

2-‘Military Rape’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

3-‘Mulier Taceat in Ecclesia’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

4-‘Merkin’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

5-‘Shrinky Recipe’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

6-‘School Rape’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

7-‘Penis Truth’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

8-‘Rapist Brain’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

Vivian Maier

Anthology

Exhibition review by Mark Durden

Vivian Maier, the reclusive photographer who made her living as a nanny, has become a fantasy figure for curators and photographers to imagine and shape as they want, argues Mark Durden in response to Anthology, the recent MK Gallery exhibition in Milton Keynes.

The story of Vivian Maier’s discovery and posthumous fame is fantastic. So much so that the trickster artist Joan Fontcuberta, in one of his recent public talks, mischievously said he had created her and asked an historian in Chicago to create the context for her work. He was joking of course.

The work of this reclusive photographer, who made her living as a nanny, came to light when the contents of a storage space she defaulted on was auctioned off in 2007, a couple of years before her death. She has subsequently become, as Fontcuberta suggests, a Mary Poppins figure whose Aladdin’s cave of photographic treasures feeds our desires and fantasies, which in the case of the exhibition Anthology, at the MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, seem to be centred upon the lost art of street photography.

The Chicago historian John Maloof was one of the buyers of Maier’s possessions and subsequently has been integral to the promotion and celebration of her photographic work – he now owns 90% of her output, over 140,000 images as well as 8mm film and audio recordings. It is from this collection this show is drawn – with over 140 photographs it makes quite a substantial exhibition, but at the same time represents a mere thousandth of the mass of photographs she left behind. With much of the exhibition given over to her black and white square format street pictures of New York and Chicago in the 1950s, she is being hyped as a new addition to an old school. Her black and white pictures are both new, in the sense they have not been seen before, and old in that they mark a past moment that we cannot really have again.

The show runs through the familiar array of street photography type subject matter – both observed and unobserved depictions of the carnival of different folk encountered in urban spaces. The picture of two elderly men crouched in contemplation over a coil of piping on a rainy sidewalk introduces the street photographer’s love of the surreal comedies of seemingly inexplicable witnessed events. The photograph of the still smoking remains of a burnt-out armchair on the sidewalk is of similar ilk, a beautiful mysterious incident. There is also the isolation of significant gestures and details, the tender touch of a couple holding hands, secretly observed from behind. The Rolleiflex camera held at waist height and into which she would look down into its viewfinder, was ideal for such surreptitious glimpses.

Maier can be astute in her picturing of the tensions and contradictions of conflict, as in the photograph entitled Armenian Woman Fighting (1956), which shows a stout older woman standing firm and defiant before a young police officer on the street in New York. The picture concentrates us on an intimacy despite their confrontation through the way his hands can be seen tightly gripping one of hers, as he tries to calm her. And there is a great image of disdain before wealth with a photograph of a woman, adorned and wrapped with two dead mink, the creature’s faces and claws all too visible and making a jarring contrast to her carefully refined self-image.  

Maier was not naïve. She was an avid film goer, both mainstream and avant-garde. A footnote in the recent Thames & Hudson monograph on Vivian Maier refers to how a house manager at a Chicago movie theatre said she even took an interest in Andy Warhol’s films. There is a certain Warholian aspect to her witty play with selfhood in her self-portraits, which are not revelatory but deadpan, blank and affectless. Perhaps one can also see her fascination for news stories and newspapers in relation to Warhol. Amongst the black-and-white street photographs, there is a remarkable and unusual close-up picture of the sides of two stacked newspapers – stuttering repetitions of photo images showing serious looking men in one stack, recurring Snoopy cartoon captions for laughter in the other: HA HA HA HA HA!. As one of her employers has recounted in Maloof’s documentary film about the photographer, Finding Vivian Maier (2013), she became an obsessive hoarder of copies of The New York Times, which she read daily and also photographed.

The opening wall text at the MK Gallery declares that this ‘self-taught artist’ now belongs to the canon of photographers alongside Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt and Garry Winogrand. This is all very well and good, but what really separates her work from those she is compared with, what makes it distinct? The self-portraits begin to signal a break from this street tradition as does her attention and fascination with newspapers, but the show does not make enough of her newspaper photographs and neither does it really emphasise enough the oddity of her self-portraits. The MK Gallery does however register the shift in her work as she started to use the Leica camera and colour film in the 1970s. Here one can find something different and less familiar. Her pictures and picturing are more layered and complex. In a photograph taken in an art museum, she plays upon the subtle interconnections between a smartly dressed woman and two girls and the painted portraits behind them. One child stands apart, rapt in attention, presumably captivated with the strange figure that Maier must have made as she took the picture. In an unusual self-portrait, her shadow and that of another figure is played off against and amongst different images on movie posters, with her shadow overlaying the image of an angel from the film Heaven Can Wait (1978), which is next to the image of an endangered female water skier on a Jaws 2 (1978) poster. And in a display of mirrors etched with the faces of stars, her hatted reflection appears over the face of Marilyn Monroe.

In a few colour photographs, the cropping and cutting of images provides her with a distinctive pictorial strategy. In the close-up of a newspaper, the rack’s Chicago Tribune sign cuts up the face of Nixon as we ponder the absurdity of his headline quote ‘Bombs saved lives’. In her picture of a suited African-American standing before her, she deliberately crops out his head, which draws attention to the way he is holding out a printed copy of The Last Messenger (1979), bearing a portrait of the face of the religious leader Elijah Mohammad.

With the last colour photograph included in the show, dated 1986, Maier has taken her ultimate self-portrait by photographing just her red hat and blue coat spread out on wooden decking. It seems a very knowing image. It beautifully suits what she has now become: a hollow figure to be taken up and reinvented again and again. Fontcuberta’s claim to have created her is then probably not that far from the truth. She is a fiction in that she has become a fantasy figure for curators and photographers to imagine and shape as they want. The problem with the MK Gallery show is a question of how Maier’s work has been filtered. By delimiting her work to more familiar and populist street photography modes, we are in danger of losing all that is weird, rich and complex among the extraordinary mass of images she has left us. ♦

All images courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier.

Vivian Maier: Anthology ran at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes from 11 June – 25 September 2022.

—

Mark Durden is a writer, artist and academic. Together with David Campbell and Ian Brown, he works as part of the art group Common Culture. Since 2017, Durden has worked collaboratively with João Leal in photographing modernist European architecture, beginning with Álvaro Siza. He is currently Professor of Photography and Director of the European Centre for Documentary Research at the University of South Wales, Cardiff.

Images:

1-Vivian Maier, Self-portrait, New York, 1953 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

2-Vivian Maier, 18 September, 1962 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

3- Vivian Maier, New York, 3 September, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

4-Vivian Maier, New York, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

5- Vivian Maier, New York, 1953 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

6- Vivian Maier, New York, 27 July, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

7-Vivian Maier, New York, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

8- Vivian Maier, New York, 2 December, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

Paris Photo 2022

Top six fair highlights

Selected by Alessandro Merola

Within the Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris Photo 2022 is now underway. This year’s offerings are more diverse and demanding than ever, making it a great litmus test for what is going on in the medium today. Here are six standout displays from the fair’s 25th edition – selected by 1000 Words Assistant Editor, Alessandro Merola. 

1. Boris Mikhailov, The Theatre of War, Second Act, Time Out
Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve

Paris’ multiple tributes to Boris Mikhailov, in the form of his retrospective at MEP and the haunting presentation of At Dusk at the Bourse de Commerce’s Salon, continue to take on new meanings following Vladimir Putin’s razing over the Ukrainian photographer’s hometown of Kharhiv. Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve’s decision to show The Theatre of War, Second Act, Time Out (2013), a rarely exhibited record of Ukraine’s slide into war, is a strong one. Produced during the wave of pro-European demonstrations in Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, these on-the-ground shots depict life behind the barricades – what the artist refers to as a “stage set”. Indeed, the Stalinist square, after which the movement was named, had been rebuilt in the 1930s as a set piece to glorify – or appeal to the memory of – revolution. But what we find here are the architects of a real revolt, ushering in the transformation of a state both deeply ambitious and tragically incomplete. In this regard, the inclusion of prints from Tea, Coffee, Cappuccino (2000–10), chronicling the colourful, plastic realty of Kharhiv in the era of new capitalism, both reflects and disturbs this story. No photographer has captured the complexity of Ukraine’s post-Soviet psyche as eloquently as Mikhailov, whose aesthetic sublimations have kept him on the inside of history, looking out.

2. Jean-Kenta Gauthier, Real Pictures: An Invitation to Imagine

Offering a sensitive dimension to erasure, memory, imagination et cetera – the themes that underpin Jean-Kenta Gauthier’s booth, which feels more like a mini-exhibition – is the installation of Real Pictures (1995) by Alfredo Jaar, who lays to rest the post-traumatic content of his Rwandan photographic encounters by entombing them in black boxes. The site contains a certain sorrow that can only be understood once you read the texts on the boxes, factually describing the photographs. The Real refers to a failure, or impossibility, of representation which sustains Jaar’s engagement with the subject matter of genocide. Whilst Daido Moriyama takes us back to the “beginning” of photography through a shot of his Tokyo bedroom in which Nicéphore Niépce’s “fossilised” View from the Window at Le Gras (1827) hangs (the clock reads 11:03, one minute after the Nagasaki bomb, as memorialised by the melted pocket watch of his mentor, Shōmei Tōmatsu), Hanako Murakami takes us back even further still via Louis Daguerre, whose words, now ignited in neon, “I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature”, penned in a letter to Niépce. The statement becomes troubled alongside Murakami’s take-free paper stack which cleverly condenses Niépce’s 1829 treatise on the invention of heliography to its front and back covers, respectively illustrating both sides of a single sheet. Murakami’s ongoing, richly researched and poetic archaeologies of the past remind us that the history of photography is full of absences. By questioning the origins of the medium, she questions the memory of the world. 

3. Noémie Goudal
Galerie Les filles du Calvaire

The fragile instability of the world humans desire to see is intelligently interpreted by Noémie Goudal, whose dynamic presentation at the group show of Galerie Les filles du Calvaire really stands out. The complexity of Goudal’s interventions reside in the way it implicates the audience – both visually and spatially – in her fabrications of nature. For example, it is only upon a close inspection that her large snow-capped mountain peak images reveal themselves as paint-coated concrete slabs mounted on cardboard; their initial illusory vastness thus become vertiginous. Yet, if Goudal attempts a trompe-l’œil, it is intentionally flawed, for she does not set out to conceal the models’ constructedness, but instead puts it centre-stage. Her manipulations are even more ambiguous in Décantation (2021), which, on the contrary, are most impactful when viewed from afar. Achieved through a process of printing on water-soluble paper and rephotographing, small, subtle iterations narrate an imaginary washing-out – or “dissolving” – across time. Over the suite of photographs, the rock formations melt, like glaciers. It’s here that Goudal, chillingly, shows us the complicity between the desire to see and the desire to destroy. 

4. Patricia Conde Galería

One of the toughest and most transcendental viewings at this year’s fair comes from Cannon Bernáldez’s El estado normal de las cosas (2022), which is on show at Mexico City’s Patricia Conde Galería. Translating to The normal state of things, the piece sees Bernáldez communicate her experience of being assaulted through the language of fragmentation: an arrangement of 105 silver gelatin prints each depict her wounded hand. By way of burning as well as solarising – extreme, continuous and multiple overexposures of the photographic film – Bernáldez touches on the violence of inhabiting a physical, female body. Just as symbolically loaded is the work of Yael Martínez, represented here by a grid of nine new photographs that tell a dark and fractured tale of contemporary life in Mexico. For all his sublime, fantastical lyricism, Martínez channels an attuned physicality, spirit of resistance and sense of rootedness. Meanwhile, there is a special opportunity to view a portfolio of delectably printed Mary Ellen Mark photographs documenting vibrant happenings at Mexican circuses. Their joyousness and eccentricities make it clear why Mark considered the circus “a metaphor for everything that has always fascinated me visually.” 

5. Jean-Vincent Simonet, Heirloom
Sentiment

Since its inauguration in 2018, the Curiosa sector has been charged with injecting cutting-edge elements into the fair. And this year is no different as Holly Roussell’s energetic curation certainly continues in this vein. Jean-Vincent Simonet’s meta-experiments that form Sentiment’s booth are interesting because they fuse analogue photography and digital techniques in a way that feels more terminal than future. Comprising a classic hang of 12 unique pieces – images of, and made at, the printing factory that has belonged to the artist’s family across three generations – Heirloom (2022) turns its attention to the instruments of production: ink tanks, paper trash and cleaning tools. Whilst they lack the exuberant, excessive fetishism of his fashion work and nudes, they retain all the entropic impulsivity and vivid luminosity that makes Simonet’s work so seductive. Using and abusing industrial printers – through what appears to be a frenzied combination of false settings, plastic foils, drying, washing, rinsing and fingertip smudging – Simonet has manufactured and modified images that bear an uncanny resemblance to painting. Although the ink sometimes seeps into the white bleed, their “aliveness” is actually deceptive, for the lead frames bestow a sense that what we are really looking at are reliquaries: elegiac witnesses of an approaching demise.

6. Kensuke Koike, Versus
Goliga Editions

Kensuke Koike entrances once again with a series of mind-bending photo-sculptures at Goliga Editions, whose presentation is one of the most mesmerising and unique of the book sector. The brass and ebony-wooden frames of Versus (2022) create a kind of playground for the collagist extraordinaire, housing 16 loose acrylic bars that display four original vintage prints on each of its sides. Sliced and spliced with razor-sharp precision (it had to be so, because he had only one shot), Koike’s hand-made assemblages, despite their obvious Surrealist twist, in the end defy any “ism”. For one can switch, rotate and recombine the puzzles to activate wonderful metamorphoses – from human to floral and back again – thereby giving these once abandoned relics the chance to live a large, albeit mathematically finite, number of other lives. As for the rolling, cloud-shaped slider that glides across the base to animate the image, it might border on the gimmicky, but there’s no denying its amusement and charm. Nothing and everything is left to chance for Koike, who offers us a most pure form of visual pleasure: play.

Paris Photo runs at the Grand Palais Éphémère until 13 November 2022.

—
Alessandro Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words.

Images:

1-Boris Mikhailov, The Theatre of War, Second Act, Time Out (2013). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve.

2-Boris Mikhailov, Tea, Coffee, Cappuccino (2000–10). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve.

3-Daido Moriyama, The Artist’s Bedroom (2008). Courtesy the artist and Jean-Kenta Gauthier.

4-Hanako Murakami, The Immaculate #D5 (2019). Courtesy the artist and Jean-Kenta Gauthier.

5-Noémie Goudal, Mountain III (2021). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Les filles du Calvaire. 

6-Cannon Bernáldez, El estado normal de las cosas (2022). Courtesy the artist and Patricia Conde Galería.

7-Jean-Vincent Simonet, Door (2022). Courtesy the artist and Sentiment.

8-Jean-Vincent Simonet, Untitled #5 (2022). Courtesy the artist and Sentiment.

9-Kensuke Koike, Versus #12 (2022). Courtesy the artist and Goliga Editions.

10-Kensuke Koike, Versus #17 (2022). Courtesy the artist and Goliga Editions.

Prarthna Singh

Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh

Book review by Emilia Terracciano

Far from clichéd photographs of violent protest, Prarthna Singh’s book records dissenting lives amidst the peaceful, female-led protest at Shaheen Bagh, Delhi to form a homage to what keeps the fabric of India bound together, writes Emilia Terracciano.

It’s chilly. She’s wrapped herself from waist to head in a woollen shawl. Swirling pink carnations, little indigo buds, bright saffron crocuses and crimson Kashmiri roses blossom all-over her: a winter garden of delights. She is waiting for her turn to be photographed. Today, the tarpaulin is azure, slightly crinkled in the middle. She stands before it and the photographer does her job. Soon after, she’ll walk away with a moist Polaroid developing her own reduced likeness.

A collection of poems, maps, letters, children’s drawings, photographs of women and children, Prarthna Singh’s Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh was created during the 100 days of a peaceful sit-in protest held at Shaheen Bagh – a working-class neighbourhood located on a trafficked commuter highway connecting Delhi to Noida from December 2019 until March 2020. Women and children, most of them Muslim, congregated at Shaheen Bagh to demonstrate against India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act and National Register of Citizens – two bills introduced by prime minister Narendra Modi, backed by his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which passed into law in December 2019.

The Citizenship (Amendment) Act makes foreign undocumented migrants and religious refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan eligible for Indian citizenship if they are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis or Christians, but not if they are Muslim. Defining citizenship through religion, the Act is widely reputed to be unconstitutional in a country that is (at least in principle) secular and devoted to protecting the right of civilians to practice religious freedom. The Act further marginalises India’s Muslim minority, the third largest in the world. Primarily led by women, the demonstration at Shaheen Bagh rippled across the country in the form of multiple local versions. It was only the spread of Covid-19 that brought Shaheen Bagh to a halt. After lockdown was declared in India, the military moved into the site and destroyed all the structures that grew around it like the rings of a tree: kitchens, chai-stalls, libraries and day-care spaces for children.

The female subject has long been the focus of Singh’s photographic career. Her Champion (2015–ongoing) offers a series of delicate and introspective black-and-white portraits of young female athletes training at government-run sport camps in the northern states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. These pubescent figures, at once vulnerable and strong, defy normative feminine roles: the devoted wife and mother, the familial custodian, preserver of tradition and domestic keeper. “This is not the archetypical female form Indian families recognise,” explains Singh. “For me personally, this figure becomes affirmative in a very patriarchal set up. One of the reasons I get excited about women and their stories is because in the Indian media, ‘woman’ is always the passive object or victim… I want to be surrounded by radical female strength. It is both helpful and hopeful, and this is what keeps me going as a photographer.”

Upon hearing about Shaheen Bagh, Singh travelled to Delhi and took up residency at her grandmother’s home, about a 15-minute walk from the site. It was the second coldest winter since 1901. Joining as a protestor first, Singh sat in, ate, drank chai, sang and chatted to the women who had gathered at Shaheen Bagh. It was later that she became a loving witness, picked up her camera and toyed with the idea of documenting the epic sit-in. Singh organised impromptu set-ups, stretched tarpaulins for backdrops and began to record protestors’ likenesses with her camera. For every portrait taken, she created an identical Polaroid to give back to the sitter. Renamed “magic paper” (jadoo ka kaagaz) by the young girls at the site, the format acquired immediate popularity owing to the advantage of being easily and immediately available. Many more women and children turned up to queue before Singh’s camera.

The photographs included in the book are collaborative and playful; Singh refuses to frame the peaceful crowd as a dangerous collective. Contrasting the demonisation of the mob by Indian mass media, and the erasure of crowds from contemporary art photography, she focused her lens on one demonstrator at a time and delighted in photographing each sitter through a series of frontal, formal and carefully-posed portraits. Each protestor faces the viewer as a proud citizen-subject. We do not find the clichéd photographs of violent protest but a documentation of dissenting lives. There are students, children and mothers – housewives clutching handbags, purses and phones, all wearing several layers of clothes.

Perhaps the salient feature of Shaheen Bagh resides in Singh’s desire to relay something of the protestors’ arguments, intentions, radical disagreements and faith for the future. The portraits and written letters from participants are both important to underscoring this effect. Singh inserts clues and markers of this feminine multitude, and the shape-shifting spaces in which it moved, dwelled, sang, breast-fed, read, cooked and rested in between the individual portraits. Tactile and textile references are threaded into the book as photographs; women lined Shaheen Bagh with fabrics brought from home, but also engaged in acts of exchange: swapping garments, burqas and shawls. The book itself is bound in an off-white, unobtrusive fabric that does not call attention to itself as an object. Singh reminds us of the political and persistent nature of textiles in the history of India, and offers a homage to what keeps the fabric of this country bound together. Shaheen Bagh, set up by women for women, was also an impermanent shelter from the doom of domesticity. The forces of order would rather these women remain invisible and undocumented, be obscured, silenced or tormented. Singh’s book is a memorial to all those who came together to protest, generating in the process a novel vision of solidarity. ♦

All images courtesy the artist © Prarthna Singh

—

Emilia Terracciano is a writer, translator and lecturer in Modern Art History at the University of Manchester.