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Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Ludwig Schirmer

Ein Dorf 1950–2022

Book review by Michael Grieve

Published with Hartmann Books, Ein Dorf (A Village) 1950–2022, is a photobook by Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler in posthumous collaboration with their late family member Ludwig Schirmer. It allows the viewer to travel through time yet stay in the same place – Berka, a small village in Thuringia, Germany – where in recent days the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) has come top in a state election. In his review, Michael Grieve writes how photography projects that collaborate with the deceased have the potential to breathe new life and recontextualise how we understand the past, the present, and project with unease into an uncertain future.

Michael Grieve | Book review | 05 Sept 2024

Serendipity can be a major creative force and harnessing its potential has the possibility to culminate into something solid and everlasting. And so it is with the modestly titled Ein Dorf (A Village) 1950–2022 published by Hartmann Books, the latest photobook project by the acclaimed German documentary photographers, Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler in posthumous collaboration with the late Ludwig Schirmer. All of them have photographed the same village at different times over a seventy year period at approximately 20 year intervals. The book is a comparative study of a specific place documented from three different perspectives over four historical periods. The story of this book is truly extraordinary, fused with many layers and chance connections that it positively feels that it was meant to come together and see the light of day. As Ute Mahler explains, the seeds of the book were sown in 2001: ‘When I discovered the pictures in my father’s estate, I was already thinking about a book. The book, At Home, with only his photographs was published in 2003. In 2019 Werner and I had the idea of taking photographs in Berka and putting all four works together.’

Ein Dorf is split into four chronological chapters; Ludwig Schirmer 1950-60, Werner Mahler 1977-78, Werner Mahler 1998 and Ute Mahler 2021-22. The ‘dorf’ in question is the small rural village of Berka, situated almost in the centre of Germany in the Thuringia district, where in recent days the far right party Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) – led by ethno-nationalist Bjorn Hocke – has come top in a state election. Thuringia is of course the place where the Nazis first won power in a German state government in 1930 before taking up the helm in Berlin three years later.

The first in this trilogy of photographers is Ludwig Schirmer who took over the family business running a mill in the village at the end of WWII. During his spare time Schirmer photographed the village over a 10 year period before moving his family to Berlin where he became a successful professional photographer. With great enthusiasm as the photographs tell, he took pictures for the most part with a medium format Primarflex 6×6 camera with great observational skill in an informal manner. His photographs are a hive of activity and always feature people, and fully embrace village life ranging from social functions and rituals to farm work, punctuated occasionally by a portrait. The slaughtering of pigs is a constant through all four projects as is the Straw Bear, a traditional character from medieval times found at carnival processions.

Photographers often used to differentiate between those with a natural or forced eye and Schirmer certainly possesses the former with an innate intuition of composing complex situations, having a measured sense of distance that is close and intimate and can only be captured with subjects who trust his presence and not question intentions. Schirmer has an unflinching visual capacity to hold still the movement and energy of the people of Berka with images that are at times reminiscent of the rural painting of Dutch Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who gives credence to the peasant population surrounded in a village context, and representing groups of people and individuals as small figures engaged in their own distinct activity. Unlike the fluffy, picturesque landscape paintings of, for example, John Constable in the 18th century, Bruegel was untainted with notions of romanticism and the sublime. In hindsight Schirmer’s pictures have a certain nostalgia, but these monochrome realist expressions convey a certain frisson of engagement and are without any agenda other than celebrating the hive of activity of village life and capturing a glimpse of an even greater sense of joy now that amongst the Berka population the horror of the WWII is behind them.

After the trauma of the war, Berka found itself as part of the German Democratic Republic, under the control of a socialist system. Thus the early stages of the GDR and Schirmer’s pictures obviously reveal little evidence of the socialist system except perhaps in one intriguing image of suited men with inappropriate fine shoes for a muddy field, observing a trench made by a tractor; conjuring perhaps a narrative of state officials making decisions about productive efficiency in the new age of forced collectivism. In some of the photographs, in an almost incidental way, can be seen a little blonde haired girl who is Ute Mahler, the daughter of Ludwig Schirmer. Here the connectedness of the stories of the Ein Dorf story of one place develops an autobiographical layer of meaning. In 2003 Ute described the process of making sense of her father’s archive: ‘I found one small black and white print – an image of a young child climbing a tree. A photograph of me. Suddenly everything came rushing back – the sweet smell of spring and summer, the gentle hilly landscape, my childhood. It felt like stumbling upon a hidden treasure. The photographs were not organised in any way; there were few prints, hardly any contact sheets, and contact sheets without any negatives. Eventually the whole family pitched in to help with the daunting task of sorting through the archive. We discovered unbelievably powerful images, dreamlike in their charisma and aesthetics. For the family the images from my father were very important. But for me they touched me not only as a daughter but, above all else, as a photographer.’

The central position of Werner Mahler’s combined projects can be understood as representing a link from one place in time to another; a personal bridge and documentary divide between Ludwig Schirmer the father, to Ute Mahler the daughter, and a historical and political bridge from communism to the reunification of a divided Germany. As a young man in the 1970’s Werner Mahler was the apprentice to the then now successful commercial photographer, Ludwig Schirmer, and at this moment Werner met and fell in love with Ute and so they married. As a student of photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig, Werner documented Berka between 1977 and 1978 for his graduate exhibition. And, despite the spectre of forced socialism, village life is still very much alive with remnants of the past but now with the added, noticeable changes of fashion as well as farm machinery albeit with continued traditions and in opposition to official government policy.

In the accompanying text to Ein Dorf, Steffen Mau, Professor of Sociology describes how at this time, ‘it was not always easy to bring an entire village into line with official policy. In Berka pigs continued to be slaughtered at home, carnival was celebrated following exotic traditions, there was music in the streets and bizarre folklore traditions were maintained. Nevertheless, anyone who opposed the party line too adamantly could expect to feel the consequences, even in a village.’ 20 years later Werner was commissioned by Stern magazine to document Berka in the context of German unification which was in the process of a turbulent transformation. Werner’s photography has sharpened with experience with a more precise eye for detail and composition. This was a period referred to as the Wende, the ‘turning’ from state socialism and a controlled economy to a democratic system with a free market economy. The difference from 20 years previously is distinct in the material effects of a consumer society. Rural character and authenticity is radically being replaced with facades from home improvement stores and cars are more visible.

The most powerful first impression of Ute Mahler’s photography is the profound sense of emptiness found in the well manicured streets of Berka. The contrast of the village from the time of her father up until today is truly startling; a microcosm of the increasing genericism of our societies and disintegration of community life. Unlike Schirmer’s joy and optimism, Ute Mahler’s project exists moving towards a vacuous impasse and asks questions, detectable in the eyes and manner of those young women she portrayed, the same age as Ute when she left Berka, as to a sense of doubt of any fruitful future. Four young girls dressed in tight jeans, tops and white trainers most probably produced in China or sweatshops in Bangladesh, India or Cambodia by girls the same age if not younger. This sounds extremely despondent and a million miles away from simple village life, though not so simple, yet we know that in almost every village today, in Europe and the UK, that the supermarket has gone some way to replace the local grocer, butcher and baker, and that the plasma screen in every living room has replaced social activity, not to mention the mobile phone. As always Ute’s portraits are photographs charged with a distinct empathy and honest distance and her subjects are never victims though undoubtedly the sense of an atomised community is clearly imbued in the tone and description of her visual representations. People seem to be there but not wholeheartedly present.

Ein Dorf opens up a portal into a hitherto and seemingly insignificant place, within which this complexity and multi-layered story reveals a wonderfully unique testament to the straight documentary genre; unpretentious, deceptively simple and grounded in a sophisticated process of showing what is ‘there’, and with this exemplary example we witness the inevitable changes of a particular society over a period of time. Time, of course, is the great force here and brings the narrative of this book together; an arbitrary photographic topography brought to reason. These pictures contain many small details for us to decipher and unravel a history of seismic proportions. Ute and Werner Mahler are without sentimentality and make no judgments, possessing a skilful ability to balance a cool and measured detachment with a warm engagement to the subject due, in part, to their personal empathetic recognition to those they photograph. Photography projects that collaborate with the deceased have the potential to breathe new life and recontextualise how we understand the past, the present and project with unease into the uncertain future. Not only is society in perpetual motion but the meaning of photographs are always constantly in a state of flux.

Sociologically Ein Dorf is a significant photobook and should be on the reading lists at all sociology and history departments at universities. The book also operates on another level which is the metaphysical, evoking memory and a melancholia of the passing of time while also revealing the urge of photography to fix that time. In his book Austerlitz, the German author W.G. Sebald, writes of the central character describing how in his photographic work he was always entranced, ‘… by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on to the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.’

The shadows of Ein Dorf have managed to be fixed by virtue of having been shared and the preservation of certain memories for the photographers themselves remains the enduring task of serious photography. Both collective and personal memory builds our identities and without it, as W.G. Sebald postulates ‘we would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past.’ ♦

All images courtesy of the artists and Hartmann Books. © Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Ludwig Schirmer

Ein Dorf 1950–2022 is published by Hartmann Books.

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

Images:

1>3-Ludwig Schirmer, Ein Dorf, 1950-1960

4>6-Werner Mahler, Ein Dorf, 1977-78

7>9-Werner Mahler, Ein Dorf, 1998

10>12-Ute Mahler, Ein Dorf, 2021-22

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Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined

Impressions Gallery, Bradford

Exhibition review by Anneka French

Co-curated by Impressions Gallery and Peckham 24, Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined features works by eight photographers who reframe official and personal archives to explore the abuses of organised religion and colonialism. As Anneka French writes, the exhibition’s diversity of influences underscores the role and value of the archive and, more crucially, the importance of radical approaches towards its reuse and interrogation.

Anneka French | Exhibition review | 1 August 2024

A statue of the Virgin Mary repeated across two photographs is a potent signifier of the power structures and abuses that inform and then I ran (2023). This suite of photographs, in which experiences of Emi O’Connell’s grandmother are re-enacted, is hung formally, with a central diptych of a blurred, brooding landscape flanked by figures in this same location. Described as ‘performative self-portraiture’, O’Connell re-tells parts of her grandmother’s story of escape from an Irish Catholic mother and baby home – often referred to as the Magdalene Laundries, institutions in which the devastating treatment of those confined is still coming to light – when she climbed from a window aged 16 and heavily pregnant with O’Connell’s father, who was subsequently forcefully adopted. O’Connell can be seen tenderly holding a sprig of cow parsley in one photograph. She can further be seen running, falling and twisting, her head bent and body crouched in distress, in images that are as strangely still, sensitive and beautiful as they are full of trauma.

The visible shutter release cable in O’Connell’s photographs is evidence of the reconstruction taking place and indeed, and then I ran embodies many of the core subjects presented in the wide-ranging and complex group exhibition Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined at Impressions Gallery, Bradford. The exhibition asks questions about the impacts of ‘official’ archives, be these institutional or familial, on (but not limited to) communities, bodies, memories and identities. Eight photographers here disrupt, re-make, re-present or reinterpret these narratives, finding meaning of their own and revealing new ways of looking at difficult things.

As with O’Connell’s photographs, the unfathomable impacts of and abuses by organised religion also occupy key roles in works by Alba Zari and Jermaine Francis. Zari’s Occult (2019-23) offers a partial picture of her own mother and grandmother’s life as members of a Christian fundamentalist sect now titled The Family International, in India, Nepal and Thailand. This is revealed through archival photographs, and comic strip-like drawings and text that highlight ways the sect drew in recruits through practices of sexual exploitation very much at odds with the smiling family photographs that Zari has layered on top of and tacked-up alongside these.

Francis’ Once Upon a Time: a bible, multiple protagonists and the propagation of gospel in racial time (2024-ongoing) is shown in and on vitrines arranged in the shape of a cross. The work itself is focused upon Anglian Church archives held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, pertaining to historic missionary initiatives in the Caribbean. Underscoring the abuses of black people under colonialism and its continuing reverberations, Francis’ work, elements of which are placed beneath magnifying sheets, and including grey archive boxes, bibles and layered prints made up of collaged archival imagery and text, asks viewers to lean over, look closely and implicate themselves within the work and its contexts.

Also working with found archival imagery, Amin Yousefi’s Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth (2022) uses protest photographs from the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 in Iran. Specifically searching out people from the crowd who look (or seem to look) directly at the camera, these isolated individuals form a newly reassembled archive of gazes photographed through a loupe. Extracting individual people from the crowd, the work presented features a cluster of small prints alongside one very large photograph that centres the wary face of a young child, pinpointing his smallness and his humanity among the protesting throng.

Woman Wearing Ring Shields Face from Flash (2019-23) by Odette England is comprised of a large paste-up and a series of glossy prints. On the left, the photographs are of male photographers, prominent camera lenses and flashbulbs standing in place of eyes as their cameras obscure their faces. On the right are photographs of women refusing to be photographed, their hands in front of their faces and heads turned away. England’s work flags the potential abuses of photography itself – how it takes, snaps, shoots and captures through the violence of vocabulary hidden in plain sight – and of the subject’s own limited power in this dynamic. England’s work assembles vernacular images, forming a new archive of resistance that speaks to contemporary feminist dialogue and ongoing challenges to patriarchal perspectives that seek to control women in body and in image.

Eleonora Agostini’s and Tarrah Krajnak’s works touch upon further feminist concerns in connection with personal identity. While Agostini’s collection of photographs A Study on Waitressing (2020-24) pays homage to her waitress mother, her sore feet and the dual performances of in/visibility necessary to her role, Krajnak’s SISMOS79 (2014) explores her identity as an Indigenous transracial person who has experienced adoption and generational trauma. Composed of five large prints, Krajnak’s work combines broken mirrors photographed in conjunction with political and pornographic magazine pages from the year of her birth, offering a highly fragmentary personal and social perspective of this window in time.

Of all the eight photographers featured, Laura Chen’s work sits rather differently. Employing a dark sense of humour, Being Framed (2022) uses the rudimentary tropes of old-fashioned, analogue criminal investigations by police or private detectives popularised in film noir to develop a fictional case lead by avatar DCI Dean Wilson. Newspaper clippings, mocked-up case files, crime scene tape and a missing rabbit poster feature in Chen’s new archive. An image of a CCTV camera is positioned high up on the wall, while a footprint is playfully glued to the floor. Since Being Framed overtly refers to imagined or fictional events, it lacks the emotional and psychological force of other works on display.

The exhibition, which draws upon multiple international contexts and inputs, is co-curated by Impressions Gallery and Peckham 24, where it showed along with other projects and exhibitions in southeast London earlier this year. In Bradford, the exhibition’s diversity of influence, approach and subject makes for a challenging and, at times, uneven viewing experience but nonetheless it is one that serves as a useful reminder of the importance of the archive and, more crucially, of the importance of radical approaches towards it. ♦

Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined runs at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, until 31 August

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

Images:

1-Untitled from Occult, 2019-23. © Alba Zari

2-Untitled from A Study in Waitressing, 2020-24. © Eleonora Agostini

3-Emi O’Connell, and then I ran, 2023.

4-Untitled from Once Upon a Time: a bible, multiple protagonists and the propagation of gospel in racial time, 2024-ongoing. © Jermaine Francis

5-Untitled, from the series Eyes Dazzle as they Search for The Truth, 2022. © Amin Yousefi

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Agnieszka Sosnowska

För

Book review by Shana Lopes

Published by Trespasser, Agnieszka Sosnowska’s debut monograph, För, is a coming-of-age story about relocating a remote corner of Iceland, which introduces us to her students, showcases her farm, and captures the passage of time as she and her husband age over two decades. As SFMOMA’s Assistant Curator of Photography Shana Lopes writes, Sosnowska invites us to rethink how labour, heartbreak, death, landscape, and the quotidian contribute to an idea of home.

Shana Lopes | Book review | 18 July 2024

A reindeer decomposing on the ground; white sheets hanging outside to dry; a man bathing in an outdoor tub: moments of quiet flow through Agnieszka Sosnowska’s pictures in her sumptuous first book, För, recently published by Trespasser. By virtue of their objecthood, all photographs are inherently silent, yet many evoke the sounds of whoever or whatever is pictured. Sosnowska’s vision offers a distinctive sonic experience of blustery winds careening through a rural landscape, bitterly cold water pouring down a cliff face, hushed conversations between people who have known each other for decades. And while many of her photographs point to stillness, the sequencing of the book, though nonlinear, is rhythmic, its cadence at once brooding and hypnotic, rapturous and meditative. Self-portraits form the chorus to this poignant ballad in black and white, bridged by stark, dramatic landscapes, unpretentious domestic still lifes, and pictures of students, friends, and family at ease. We may think we listen only with our ears and look solely with our eyes, yet we also sense with our bodies, and these Icelandic scenes exude the briskness of their unforgiving environment. Even the book’s exterior adds to the overall experience. It is bound in a cool bluish-gray cloth, the colour I imagine Iceland’s sky and water look like. It depicts a world of raw beauty that asks us to be present and attuned with all our senses.

Much of the power of Sosnowska’s photographs, the majority taken with a large-format film camera, resides in their uncluttered simplicity. Clean lines guide our eye, but the scenes are neither immaculate nor pristine. They are lived in, revealing signs of aging, even decay: a rusted car door, the well-worn cushions of a couch, a pile of old, used tires. Every one was captured near the artist’s home in eastern Iceland, where she has lived and worked as an elementary school teacher for more than two decades. Originally from Poland, she immigrated to the United States as a child, then as a young adult visited Iceland on a whim and fell in love there.

The book’s title – För – translates as “trip” in Icelandic, and so signifies a journey and the physical imprints one leaves behind. The word also connotes a vessel that delivers things from one location to another. So, what are these photographs transporting? What kind of trip is Sosnowska taking us on, and what traces has she left behind for us to follow?

This is certainly a journey of belonging, of making a home, and it is raw, authentic, and unpretentious. Sometimes intensely intimate. Consider, for example, the photographs of the artist and her husband. In one, he stands behind her, his hand inside her button-front dress, as she stares unabashedly at the camera. In another sublime moment, they pose before a misty waterscape like a modern Caspar David Friedrich painting, the view so awe-inspiring and powerful that their presence becomes secondary to the terrain. These pictures are not about tourism. Rather, they take us on an expedition of Sosnowska’s life. We meet her students; we see her farm; we watch her and her husband, whom she calls her Viking in the acknowledgments, age over the course of 20 years. I find myself wondering why she is publishing her first photobook now, if she has been shooting for this long and her photographs are this incredible. Indeed, her training harks back to the 1990s, when she studied at the Massachusetts College of Art with professors such as Barbara Bosworth, Nicholas Nixon, Frank Gohlke, and Abe Morell. But that is a story for another time. För centers the artist’s Icelandic journey and asks us to reflect on our own paths and the imprints we leave.

A spellbinding landscape framed by a jigsaw-puzzle web of trees opens the book. Soft grasses line the foreground, and beyond the arboreal lattice we see a seemingly boundless terrain. The photograph is a literal and metaphorical entrance to our trip as well as a portal into Sosnowska’s mind. It is also a landscape shaped by humans, which seems to be a key theme running through the publication: human versus nature, or perhaps more aptly, with nature. The photographs in För often depict coexistence and interaction between humans and the natural environment, highlighting the beauty and fragility of this relationship.

What truly stands out in this beautifully edited grouping (a hallmark of Trespasser’s publications) are the self-portraits. Vulnerable and unapologetically authentic, they function like punctuation, little reminders to pause and remember whose journey this is. Sometimes Sosnowska is alone, other times she is accompanied by her husband. In watching them grow older, we witness them undergoing life’s most humbling experience. The artist’s face and body change, as does her relationship with the camera, as she moves from performing for it to collaborating with it. These self-portraits are a testament to the artist’s personal evolution and its reflection in her work.

Together, the pictures show us what home means to Sosnowska: the people, the place, the architecture, the small details. She notes, ‘By taking these pictures, I belong. I am part of something greater than myself. These photographs are both my myths and truth. They are my love, hopes, fears, and strength.’ Home, for her, is not singular or fixed. We sometimes have the privilege of choosing a new home, and that place changes us. A trip to Iceland more than 20 years ago forever changed Sosnowska’s path, bringing with it a new language, an intense love, a teaching career, and a rural way of life. Ultimately, this book is a vessel detailing one artist’s search for a sense of belonging, inviting us to rethink how labour, heartbreak, death, landscape, and the quotidian contribute to an idea of home. It is a journey that resonates with our own quests for connection. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Trespasser. © Agnieszka Sosnowska

För is published by Trespasser.

—
Shana Lopes is an Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Born and raised in San Francisco, she earned her doctorate in art history from Rutgers University with a focus on the history of photography. Over the past fifteen years, she has gained curatorial experience at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has curated or co-curated exhibitions such as Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue, Sightlines: Photographs from the Collection, A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA, Sea Change, Zanele Muholi: Eye Me, and the upcoming 2024 SECA Art Award.

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Les Rencontres d’Arles 2024

Beneath The Surface

Festival review by Mark Durden

For the 55th time, Arles, the historic Roman city in southern France, hosts the prestigious Les Rencontres d’Arles, where municipal buildings are transformed to showcase the visual legacies of photographers and artists worldwide. This year’s theme, Beneath the Surface, explores narratives that uncover divergent paths, often revealing vulnerabilities in seemingly impermeable facades. As expected, the festival boasts its usual grandeur, meticulous organisation, and impressive works by renowned artists. Yet, as Mark Durden writes, it is the traditional photographic approaches that retain a profound impact amidst the festival’s exploration of new directions in the medium.

Mark Durden | Festival review | 11 July 2024 | In association with MPB

Sophie Calle’s exhibition of some of her own artworks and possessions are left to rot in the subterranean Cryptoporticus in Arles, offering a great contrast to the clamouring image spectacle of the very festival of which it is part. On discovering one of her favourite works, The Blind, had become toxic through mould spores after her studio was damaged in a storm, and refusing to follow the restorer’s suggestion that it should be destroyed, Calle decided to exhibit it (together with other works that had been contaminated and objects from her life that she no longer had any use for but could not throw away) in a humid and underground place where its degradation could continue. Calle’s show, in this respect, offers a mini retrospective, a darkly comic counterpoint to the grandiosity of more spectacular displays above ground, and a reminder of the ultimate and inevitable mortality of art and the artist. When I viewed her exhibition, water was constantly dripping upon large framed black-and-white prints of graves, laid on the floor.

This year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles is marked by a schism between those who work against photography, those who deploy it through montage in installations and those who less ostentatiously explore its intrinsic properties. Calle works against photography, but knowingly and comedically, clearly relishing the correspondence between her decaying pictures and their sepulchral and funerary setting.

In the impressive interior of the 15th century century Gothic Église des Frères Prêcheurs, Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel’s flagship show’s magical realist response to the migration route across Mexico to the US, with its overblown and enigmatic combinations of pictorial elements, objects, archival material and Mexican lotería card imagery (this game of chance, presumably there to bring in an iconography related to Mexico and imply the journey of migrants is a lottery and up to fate) muddles the clarity of reportage and seemingly relishes the resultant ambiguity. The US’ brutal migrant policy and murderous exploitation by cartels through both people and drug trafficking (nothing to do with chance) becomes a cue to a fantastical tale, modelled on Jules Verne’s science fiction Journey to the Centre of the World (1864). The problem with such a spectacular display is that it is hard to engage and relate to what is going on as images collide and compete for attention. If montage was originally intended to be critically dialectical and produce new meaning, the danger here is that things become all too uncertain.

Mary Ellen Mark, who is given a significant and engaging retrospective at Espace Van Gogh, valorises an older, humanist documentary tradition; her 1987 portrait of the Damm family in the car in which they were living at the time, is in some ways her “Migrant Mother”. Perhaps it is not so obsolete as de Middel’s pop documentary display might suggest. The real goes beyond our imagination, and is always full of surprises. Photographers like Mark are attuned to this and bring it out again and again in many of their extraordinary pictures. In her powerful, colourful, somewhat voyeuristic depictions of sex workers in Mumbai, she may be outside but the sense is that she pictures more from the inside and in affinity with these women. At the Palais de L’Archevêché, I’m So Happy You Are Here, Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now curated by Lesley A. Martin, Takeuchi Mariko and Pauline Vermare, was a welcome change and far cry from the continued celebration of such male Japanese photographers as Daido Moriyama and their fixation on women as subject. But with so many photographers on show, 26, it only functions as a taster. I would have liked to have seen more work by Mari Katayama. Born with tibial hemimelia, which caused the bones in her lower legs and left hand to be undeveloped, and having decided to amputate her legs at the age of nine, the young artist sees herself as ‘one of the raw materials to use in my work’ in extraordinary self-portraits with hand-sewn prostheses.

Ishiuchi Miyako, recipient of the Women in Motion Award, as well as showing in I’m So Happy, is given a solo show at the Salle Henri-Comte, presenting photographs of objects and possessions remaining after death: her mother’s used lipstick, her lingerie, her hairbrush tangled with her hair, her dentures. There is also a picture of her mother’s scarred skin. For Miyako, ‘things touched by my mother were like part of her skin.’ The intimacy and poignancy of such photographs is continued in other pictures: the clothing and personal objects of Atomic bomb victims, from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and Frida Kahlo’s belongings, her nail varnish, decorated corsets and casts, through which one can sense the presence and strength of the artist. Miyako is responsive to the intrinsic properties and resonances of photography as an auratic medium. In contrast to Calle’s funereal retrospective, for Miyako, objects from the past, through photography, are ‘revived in the present moment.’

In many ways, New Farmer (2024) by Bruce Eesly offers a bright, jaunty and comic interlude to the festival; an AI generated mock documentary, consisting of photographs and texts presented as if from the 1960s, parodying the Green Revolution’s goal of intensified agricultural yields, by showing farmers, fields and smiling kids replete with oversized vegetables. Such absurdity and fakery serves as a fictional counterpoint to the reality of what increasing farming yields has led to, as the artist says: ‘giant fields of monocultures, fertiliser run-off, pesticide pollution and a major loss of genetic plant diversity.’

The revelation of Nicolas Floc’h’s exhibition is that there is a rainbow of colours in water. His epic quasi-scientific project, Rivers Ocean. The Landscape of Mississippi’s Colors (2024), a dazzling array of different blocks of pure colour prints, the result of photographs taken underwater at different depths, presented together with black-and-white photographs of the land, nevertheless remained baffling. While the descriptive detail in some of the captioning texts might help explain what causes the colours – ‘In Minneapolis, the Mississippi gets its colour from the tanins of northern forests… At the surface, a bright luminous orange turns bright red at one to two meters in depth’ – in the end, I was left pondering the gulf between these beautiful and seductive colour fields and the pollution and ecological disaster they presumably are indexing.

At La Mécaniqué Générale, there is more colour, not so much in the photography, which is predominantly black-and-white, but on the walls that animate and resist the potential stasis of ordered clusters of photographs in Urs Stahel’s beautifully curated show, When Images Learn to Speak, drawn from the collection of Astrid Ullens de Schooten Whettnall. Since the collector has been buying up whole series rather than individual photographs, Stahel pursues the conceptual implications of serial groups of images, beginning with Harry Callahan’s street portraits and Walker Evans’ worker portraits. The show is very much about the formal richness, the subtleties and lasting fascination with what are mostly now classic photographs. There are also some nice surprises, including Max Regenberg’s billboards, for example, in both colour and black-and-white, taken over two decades, a simple register of fortuitous collisions and relations between the imagery of billboards and their settings: the crumpled rear end of a car appearing as if trampled by giant feet on the advertising beside it. Is there not a lesson for Arles here? Maybe we do not need the fireworks. Straight(-forward) photography can still be very engaging and lasting.

Stahel’s curation links well with Lee Friedlander’s small survey show at LUMA. Friedlander was also in Stahel’s show and some of his TV pictures appear in both exhibitions. An outlier to the festival, the Friedlander exhibition nevertheless was a vital and refreshing addition. Selected and curated by filmmaker Joel Coen, the show underscores the enduring richness of his work and brilliant understanding of the possibilities of photographic form. Coen is skilled in picking out the compositional play of elements in well-known and lesser-known Friedlanders. The point made by Friedlander in the 1960s was that montage effects can already be found in the world; it is a question of framing. He is a picture-maker who made a virtue out of the limits of photography. A pity there are so few new contemporary photographers on show at Arles that come close.♦

Les Rencontres d’Arles 2024 runs until 29 September 2024.

—
Mark Durden is an academic, writer and artist. He is Professor of Photography and the Director of the European Centre for Documentary Research at the University of South Wales. He works collaboratively as part of the artist group Common Culture and, since 2017, with João Leal, has been photographing modernist architecture in Europe.

Images:

1-Sophie Calle, Finir en Beauté, 2024. Courtesy Anne Fourès

2-Cristina de Middel, An Obstacle in the Way [Una Piedra en el Camino], Journey to the center series, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

3-Cristina de Middel, The One That Left [La que se Fue], Journey to the center series, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

4-Cristina de Middel, The Black Door [La Puerta Negra], Journey to the center series, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

5-Mary Ellen Mark, Rekha with beads in her mouth, Falkland Road, Mumbai, India, 1978. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

6-Mary Ellen Mark, Vashira and Tashira Hargrove, Suffolk, New York, 1993. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

7-Mary Ellen Mark, The Damm family in their car, Los Angeles, California, 1987. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

8-Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled. From the eyes, the ears series, 2002-04. Courtesy the artist and Aperture Foundation

9-Sakiko Nomura, Untitled, 1997 from the Hiroki series. Courtesy the artist and Aperture Foundation

10-Hitomi Watanabe, Untitled from the Tōdai Zenkyōtō series, 1968-69. Courtesy the artist and Aperture Foundation.

11-Ishiuchi Miyako. Mother’s #35. Courtesy the artist and The Third Gallery Aya

12-Ishiuchi Miyako. ひろしま / hiroshima #37F donor: Harada A. Courtesy the artist and The Third Gallery Aya

13-Bruce Eesly, Peter Trimmel wins first prize for his UHY fennel at the Kooma Giants Show in Limburg, 1956. From the New Farmer series, 2023. Courtesy the artist

14-Bruce Eesly, Selected potato varieties are rated in sixteen categories according to the LURCH Desirable Traits Checklist, 1952. From the New Farmer series, 2023. Courtesy the artist

15-Bruce Eesly, Farm table in Dengen, 1955. From the New Farmer series, 2023. Courtesy the artist

16-Nicolas Floc’h, White River, Badlands, South Dakota, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

17-Nicolas Floc’h, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

18-Nicolas Floc’h, Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

19-Nicolas Floc’h, Mississippi River, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

20-Moyra Davey, Subway Writers III, 2011. Courtesy the artist

21-Martha Rosler, Photo-Op, photomontage. From the House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home series, 2004. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne/Munich

22-Judith Joy Ross, Annie Hasz, Easton, Pennsylvania, Protesting the Iraq War, Living With War. From the Portraits series, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne

23>24-Courtesy Lee Friedlander and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York.

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Silvia Rosi

Disintegrata

Exhibition review by Mariacarla Molè

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

Mariacarla Molè | Exhibition review | 20 June 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

—
Mariacarla Molè is an art writer based in Turin.

1000 Words favourites

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

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age.

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect.

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries.

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

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