Jilke Golbach Archives

1000 Words archive

15 Years, 15 Picks

Selected by Lucy Soutter

Marking 15 years of 1000 Words, Lucy Soutter takes us on a journey through our archive, offering a selection of features based on her own affinities across the magazine’s history. Capturing the richness of an archive and its ability to generate multiple routes through the material contained within, Soutter’s eclectic picks, as she writes, ‘celebrate the sweep of 1000 Words in embracing a range of 21^st century photographic practices.’

Lucy Soutter | Archive highlights | 26 Sept 2024 | In association with MPB

I once spent a week time travelling to the 1960s. I was half-way through a PhD on photography in first-generation Conceptual Art when my supervisor sent me to the library to immerse myself in period art magazines – including Artforum for the avant-garde side of things, and Art in America for a mainstream view. She told me not to worry about reading every article (though I made some useful discoveries) but to skim every single page in chronological order, to immerse myself in the general culture of the time through the pictures, letters pages, ads, layout, etc. My week-long flashback to the decade of my birth gave me untold insights into the aesthetics, politics and general mood of the period. Magazines are traditionally classed as “ephemera,” cultural forms with fleeting significance, important primarily in the moment they are produced. That very topicality makes them an ideal form for studying the conscious and unconscious preoccupations of the time, whether the past or the near-present.

This assignment, to look back over 15 years of 1000 Words (particularly the last 12, as archived on the website) has taken me on a journey through my own past: exhibitions visited, books read, and articles shared in the classroom with students, as well as many important things I missed. At the same time, the exercise clarified trends that have emerged from the flow of visual and written materials. My selections are eclectic to celebrate the sweep of 1000 Words in embracing a range of 21^st century photographic practices. I also want to draw attention to the ambition of the editorial teams over the years, led by Tim Clark, in extending the discussion of contemporary photography into new terrain. Although the pieces in this online magazine are short, they are bold in mobilising concepts from an array of academic and pop cultural contexts. The magazine has often been the first to publish emerging artists and writers, many of whom are now familiar names. Tracing the expansion of the field through evolving configurations of genres and presentation formats, it has also played a key role in promoting a broader range of practitioners.

Part of the richness of an archive is its capacity to generate multiple different routes through the material. This set of selections, loosely chronological, are based on my own affinities. I hope that they will invite you to dip in, whether to revisit familiar selections or make fresh discoveries.

1. Esther Teichmann, Drinking Air, and Mythologies
Interview by Brad Feuerhelm Issue 14, 2012

When I started teaching at art schools in the early 2000s, the UK photography scene was dominated by documentary approaches. Contemporary photography is now so much more eclectic that it is hard to believe that a practice such as Esther Teichmann’s needed to take a stand against this orthodoxy to embrace symbolist themes, painterly gestures and mixed media installation. The images in this portfolio combine with the text to offer a rich field of possibility. Teichmann’s distinctive voice, her embrace of poetics, and the generosity of her approach are all evident in this interview. 1000 Words has provided a platform for a number of artists emerging in parallel expressive modes, including Tereza Zelenkova (28) and Joanna Piotrowska (30).

2. Daisuke Yokota, Back Yard
Essay by Peggy Sue Amison Issue 15, 2012

‘There is a revolution going on in the work of emerging photographer Daisuke Yokota, a revolution that links the past with the future of Japanese photography.’ In a few deft paragraphs, Peggy Sue Amison provides several different points of entry for viewers seduced by Yokata’s evocative, mysterious images. She sketches in Yokata’s context in relation to the grainy, blurry aesthetic of the Provoke movement and describes how the photographer updates Japanese zine culture with collaborations and a participatory approach. Amison illuminates how his use of experimental processes such as solarisation and rephotographing combine with banal architecture, natural forms and faceless figures to create work that is distinctly Japanese and distinctly contemporary. As with Gordon Macdonald’s essay on Thomas Sauvin’s Beijing Silvermine project (15) or Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo’s framing of Nadège Mazars’ Mama Coca (38) this concise piece provides essential context for interested readers to pursue further research into an important international practice.

3. Sara-Lena Maierhofer, Dear Clark, A Portrait of a Con Man
Interview by Natasha Christia Issue 16, 2013

I confess that I was late to the photobook scene. It had been heating up for the first decade of the 2000s before I realised that this was not just a fad or nerdy subculture (though it has its fads and nerdy aspects) and that I needed to pay attention to it. 1000 Words was one of my go-to destinations for reading about new releases. I was so impressed by Natasha Christia’s interview with the author/artist/maker of Dear Clark that I ordered the book and looked with new eyes at its skilful combination of obsessive research, idiosyncratic reenactment and seductive, self-referential layout. As I have learned more about this aspect of contemporary photography culture, I have come to appreciate the extent to which the book reviewers for 1000 Words (variously photographers, writers, book-makers, curators and editors themselves) have contributed both to defining the photobook as a form with its own unique concerns, and to creating a canon-in-progress of its plural possibilities.

4. Julian Stallabrass, Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images
Book Review by James McArdle Issue 16, 2013

In 2008 – five years into a war that had seen the US, UK and allies invade and occupy Iraq – Julian Stallabrass curated the Brighton Photo Biennial as a searing critique of the uses of photography as a tool of pro-war propaganda, exploring the ways photographers past and present can work against the conventions of the genre to provoke other forms of understanding. How can war photography serve as a lesson or a warning rather than just pulling us into its quasi-pornographic thrall? James McArdle draws some of the key issues out of Stallabrass’ 2013 anthology of projects, essays, and interviews related to the festival, pointing to artists including Trevor Paglen, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, and Coco Fusco, and writers including Sarah James and Stefaan Decostere.

5. Duane Michals, Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals
Essay by Aaron Schuman Issue 18, 2014

In this feature on Duane Michals, Aaron Schuman traces the historical roots of staged, narrative photography far beyond Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills to Victorian tableau photography. Schuman argues convincingly that in Michals’ hands the genre does not merely advance photography as an art form, but also grapples with aspects of experience that transcend ordinary vision. Although it may be difficult to identify the direct impact of Michals on contemporary photographers whose work, like his, is filmic (like Jeff Wall), fictive (like Gregory Crewdson) or constructed (like Matt Lipps), Schuman points out that the sophisticated use of series and sequence by photographers such as Paul Graham and Alec Soth owes a debt to Michals’ storytelling capabilities. (The final image in this portfolio, Michals’ This photograph is my proof is my all-time favourite image + text work).

6. Laura El-Tantawy, In the Shadow of the Pyramids
Book Review by Gerry Badger Issue 19, 2015
Matthew Connors, Fire in Cairo
Book Review by Max Houghton Issue 20, 2015

It is difficult for a magazine, which in its previous format, only came out a couple of times a year to respond to current events or political crises like the Arab Spring, especially when photographic projects, like novels, sometimes take years to come to fruition*. Gerry Badger’s 2015 review of Laura El-Tantawy’s book In the Shadow of the Pyramids describes the artist’s response to the events in Tahir Square in 2011 in the context of her own life inside and outside Egypt. In response to this blend of document and personal archive, Badger provides a personal meditation on how we create photographic narratives out of the messy flow of life. Max Houghton’s review of Matthew Connors’ Fire in Cairo in the following issue is a more wrought, imagistic essay, a perfect fit for Connor’s disorienting, back-to-front combination of surreal images and fragmented fiction. Together, these two reviews open a space to consider how we see, remember and understand protest and its aftermath.

7. Saul Leiter Retrospective
Essay by Francis Hodgson Issue 21, 2016

One of the important tasks of the critic is to return to older works and read them afresh in light of current developments. Events may be fixed in the past, but their importance for us shifts in significant ways that need to be acknowledged and articulated. This review illuminates one of the things we take for granted about contemporary photography – that most of it is in colour – and reminds us that it was not always so. Roving across Leiter’s street photography, fashion work and painterly ambitions, Hodgson’s essay and selection of images offer a celebration of Leiter’s glowing Kodachrome aesthetic and illuminate its contemporary appeal.

8. Richard Mosse, Incoming
Essay by Duncan Wooldridge Issue 25, 2017

1000 Words has provided a constructive platform for encountering 21^st century social documentary photographers who use strategies from contemporary art. Photographers like Lisa Barnard (25), Salvatore Vitale (26) and Gideon Mendel (36) offer projects that are rigorously researched, visually and technically innovative, and presented in layered, imaginative forms designed to jolt us out of familiar understandings of social situations. Such work can be highly controversial. This essay by Duncan Wooldridge provides a response to a flurry of topical online debates (by writers including Daniel C. Blight, Lewis Bush and JM Colberg) around Richard Mosse’s exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London and book Incoming from 2017, and its controversial use of military-grade thermal imaging technology to create eerie, spectacular video and still imagery of migrants from the Middle East and Global South. Fiercely analytical and ethically engaged, Woodridge frames the project in the philosophy of Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben, while keeping an eye on the economic and institutional dilemmas of being a (materially successful) political artist.

9. Lebohang Kganye, Dipina tsa Kganya
Interview with Sarah Allen Issue 34, 2021

For centuries, self-portraiture has provided artists with a way to explore their own identity and self-presentation. A new generation of artist photographers including Arpita Shah (27) Kalen Na’il Roach (32) and Sheida Soleimani (38) are turning to archival imagery, family albums and strategies of montage to counter dominant colonial (and frequently racist) histories with imaginative autonarratives. In this interview with Sarah Allen, Lebohang Kganye (Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024 winner) explores the complexities of figuring her own identity within post-apartheid South Africa, and how the interweaving of family photography and performance gives her scope to recuperate personal, familial and tribal memory within the context of an exhibition in a Bristol slave owner’s 18^th century home.

10. Curator Conversations #11: Alona Pardo Features, 2020

At their best, exhibitions can define practices and the ways they are understood, bringing new ideas into focus. To make this work happen, curators must embody various qualities: administrative, collaborative, critical and visionary. In her contribution to the Curator Conversations feature series, subsequently drawn together into a book, Alona Pardo discusses the layers of consideration that went into the exhibitions she curated at the Barbican before leaving to be Head of the Arts Council Collection. Her drive to facilitate spaces for creative discussion rather than promote her own point of view have led to a series of highly influential exhibitions including Masculinities: Liberation through Photography of 2020 and RE/SISTERS of 2023.

11. Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, One Wall a Web
Book Review by Taous R. Dahmani Issue 30, 2019

Photographers are more likely than other kinds of artmakers to also be writers of non-fiction, fiction and/or criticism. This can sharpen the edges of the language they use in their work. In this review, Taous R. Dahmani looks at artist/writer/editor Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s award-winning book One Wall a Web and describes the associative force of his filmic juxtapositions of text and image. Dahmani seeks precedents for his pointed appropriations in the scrapbooks of historical African Americans seeking to reclaim their own representation. On a related note, Dahmani’s response to questions provided by the 1000 Words feature series and book Writer Conversations (edited by myself and Duncan Wooldridge) convey a vivid sense that research and writing around photography are urgent and thrilling. She includes an inspiring list of classic and recent texts related to photography that made me want to run away on an extended reading retreat.

12. Cao Fei, Blueprints
Essay by Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo Issue 34, 2021

While the cultures of contemporary art and photography share certain structures, there are ongoing disparities in their economic and cultural currency (one reason why many lens-based practitioners insist on being called “artists” rather than “photographers”). It is sometimes difficult for outsiders to decipher the coded language used to place a practice in one camp or the other, especially when some move fluidly between contexts. Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo’s account of Cao Fei’s 2021 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize win provides a window into the world of a high-flying international artist, represented by mega-gallery Sprüth Magers and whose astonishingly polished, high-tech, multimedia work is more likely to be seen at Serpentine Gallery or the Venice Biennale than in a dedicated photography gallery. Escobedo’s essay explores the work’s push and pull between ironic simulation and fantastical techno-utopianism. The Chinese State’s role as a geopolitical and industrial superpower is never far out of the frame, but Fei’s relationship to it remains strategically ambiguous. As a productive counterpoint, this issue also features Fergus Heron’s exhibition review of Noémie Goudal’s Post Atlantica (34), a body of photographic and moving image installation work that sits firmly within a contemporary art sphere while also asking rich and probing questions about how photographs operate as documents, images and phantasms. For those interested in the representational politics of The Deusche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, the most prominent international art photography award, see Tim Clark’s impassioned 2020 editorial, ‘False signals and white regimes: an award in need of decolonisation.’

13. Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure
Book Review by Jilke Golbach Issue 36, 2022

1000 Words has devoted a significant number of its features to female experience and points of view, including the delirious layered portrait constructions of Dragana Jurišić (22), the intimate portraits of Yukuza women by Chloé Jafé (29) and Carmen Winant’s powerful lexicon of found images around abortion (43). Laia Abril’s On Rape is the middle piece of her trilogy of books On Misogyny, following On Abortion (2016) and leading towards On Mass Hysteria. Bodily harm, trauma, silence, guilt and victim-shaming weave through Jilke Golbach’s review, framing Abril’s investigative project with its evocative, visceral images in relation to the persistence of rape and its impacts in the contemporary world.

14. After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989–2024 Exhibition Review by Lillian Wilkie Issue 42, 2024

In photography, as in the rest of society, one of the anxieties about globalisation is that it will erode local cultures. At the same time, we live with the paradox that it is often in relation to each other’s intersectional differences that our own distinctive cultures come into focus. An important strand of 1000 Words essays and reviews has explored work by photographers from the UK and Ireland, well-known ones (like Brian Griffin, 20) and those deserving greater attention (Vanessa Winship, 16), those exploring private relationships (Matthew Finn, 25), those who record distinctive local places and material culture (Café Royal Books, 41), and those who explore the performance of Britishness (Simon Roberts, 27). In this review, Lillian Wilkie dives into Johnny Pitts’ unruly travelling exhibition of British photography since the fall of the Berlin Wall, her vivid language looping around the rich mix of photography to ask, as the exhibition does, how we might reimagine the cultural and creative force of the British working class after Thatcherism.

15. London City Guide
Tim Clark with Thomas King Features, 2024

When I ask photography students to read magazines, it is to improve their knowledge of recent practices and debates, and to introduce them to the key figures, communities, activities, institutions and markets that make up the contemporary network. The intermittent city guides, festival highlights, annual photobook roundups and even obituaries provided by 1000 Words provide different angles on a scene that is growing, multifaceted and increasingly interconnected. The London City Guide sets the stage by providing an instructive analysis of the current crisis in UK arts and education funding before introducing a handful of the leading institutions, including the V&A, The Photographers’ Gallery and Autograph, as well as Flowers Gallery as a sample of a large commercial gallery, and Large Glass as an example of a smaller gallery making interesting propositions about photography within contemporary art. These features provide a vital way to trace flows of influence in the UK and internationally. They also fulfil one of the original key functions of art criticism: providing a pleasurable vicarious experience of things we may not be able to see in person. ♦

—
An artist, critic and art historian, Lucy Soutter is Reader in Photography at the University of Westminster where she is Course Leader of the Expanded Photography MA. She is author of Why Art Photography? (2018) and co-editor with Duncan Wooldridge of Writer Conversations (2023) and The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies (2024).

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.

Lisa Oppenheim

Spolia

Exhibition review by Jilke Golbach

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

Jilke Golbach | Exhibition review | 23 May 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Images:

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

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

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

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

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

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

1000 Words favourites

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

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age.

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect.

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries.

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

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

Sem Langendijk

Haven

Exhibition review by Jilke Golbach

Jilke Golbach visits Haven, Sem Langendijk’s current exhibition at Foam Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and leaves wishing for more fruitful avenues of critique via a deeper dive into what sustains squatter communities, in the process asking: what can photography uncover when we look closely, and listen carefully alongside?

‘City air will set one free,’ goes an old German saying, carved into the gates of medieval Europe’s main trading cities. It referred to a law that freed city residents from feudal conditions, fostering a new sense of autonomy, spurring migration from country to city, and turning towns into vibrant centres of trade and commerce. Long since, urban life has been associated with liberty. Great cities thrive on the unrestricted coming together of people and ideas, of different ways of thinking and modes of being. And it is in cities that collective struggles for rights and freedoms have been most fiercely fought.

By the middle of this century, cities are projected to house three quarters of the planet’s population. But what’s left of our urban freedoms? This question lies at the heart of Sem Langendijk’s documentary project Haven, which is on show at Foam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, until 18 June, and was published as a book by The Eriskay Connection in 2022. Through stark urban landscape photographs and sympathetic portraits, Langendijk explores the transformation of post-industrial areas in London, Amsterdam and New York. Crossing borders between these urban centres, he examines the processes of regeneration, gentrification and privatisation in an effort to chart the double meaning of the word ‘haven’ as both a harbour and place of refuge.

Langendijk’s own childhood forms the point of departure for Haven. The photographer was raised in a community of squatters, creatives and workers in the western docklands of Amsterdam, where his parents set up home in an abandoned railway station. At the age of ten, this transient community was demolished to make way for new residential development. Langendijk only came to appreciate his extraordinary youth much later. He now fondly remembers growing up with a sense of unbounded freedom and adventure. “For me this project was about homecoming,” says Langendijk. “The goal was to create a narrative about my childhood, about what I experienced growing up in Amsterdam, and to pay tribute to that.”

His pictures of current squatter communities holding onto the industrial fringes of Amsterdam against an encroaching skyline of new-built apartment blocks reflect this search of a home that no longer exists. In the defiant gaze of a boy, photographed in mismatching socks whilst stood on a weathered table, we might see a translation of Langendijk’s own experiences but also a provocation to consider who or what is lost when alternative ways of urban living are erased.

Langendijk is preoccupied with the urban processes that make cities increasingly unlivable for everyone but monied metropolitan elites, where historical ties and neighbourhoods are replaced with new, often dystopian realities of anonymity, surveillance and governance. With Haven, he seeks to place the transformation of the Amsterdam docks in dialogue with the Docklands of London and the Red Hook neighbourhood of New York – all formerly industrial waterfront areas where local or creative communities once thrived but which are now dominated by private, often global interests.

The subject of urban change has long captivated photographers, be it post-war reconstruction, industrial ruination, sites of memory, suburbia, council estates, or community life. Today, a critique of the processes and flows of capital that are causing widespread urban displacement, social exclusion and socio-economic inequality is much needed. The photographs on display here show stark contrasts: on the one hand, we are confronted with alienating architectures of glass and steel; on the other hand, we come face-to-face with people living on the margins.

Haven offers few contextual anchors, with the photographs remaining untitled, undated and unlocated. This disorientation serves to emphasise the increasing homogeneity of these cityscapes but also allows subtle resonances to emerge between the works. Only in a few places does text support interpretation, sometimes in the form of quotes from well-known urbanists such as Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs and Richard Sennett, which feature in the book as well as the exhibition.

The result is visually striking, yet one wonders whether a critique of these issues might not benefit from a greater inclusion of voices and research-based documentation. If what is at stake with gentrification is the disappearance of locality, the loss of place specificity, and the social exclusion of entire groups or classes of people, doesn’t abstraction further add to the erasure of a human scale? Even if strong similarities exist between the development of London, Amsterdam and New York (certainly in terms of their architectural aesthetics and capital flows), shouldn’t they also be understood within their own historical, political and social contexts? Are the creatives, ravers and festival-goers of the docklands of Amsterdam really the same as the residents displaced from Brooklyn, New York?

Without attention to specificity, there is a chance of reproducing a simplifying narrative that pits “true creatives” against “elite ghettos”, poor residents against trendy coffee bars, and corporate bodies against the man on the street. Whilst this goes some way to answering one of the project’s central questions – “Who owns the city?” – the mechanisms of gentrification are typically far more complex than simple dichotomies would allow. Gentrification is a symptom, not just a cause of accelerating cycles of change, a spiralling housing problem, and a growing cost of living crisis. The true problems of cities are problems of capitalism – an illusion of unlimited growth that endlessly reproduces the same inequalities in space. We are all caught up and complicit in the forces that drive it. But whilst the processes are global, the effects are hyper local.

How do we engage with such enormous complexity through photography? What questions can we ask? And what pitfalls should we aim to avoid?

Langendijk takes the decades after 1960 as a counterpoint to today’s urban transformations, drawing inspiration from urban scholars and grassroots movements active in the second half of the 20^th century. In those years, deindustrialisation and suburbanisation in Western cities left large parts of cities empty, with one result being that space was, for a time anyway, easier to come by. Seen through Langendijk’s lens, post-industrial areas became “fertile playgrounds” for outsiders and creatives, and abandoned docklands “a free haven for the adventurous”. But what if we approached these spaces through a more critical lens that included questions of race, gender and class? Were they really such safe havens, and for whom?

Nostalgia runs the risk of glossing over the rougher edges of complex circumstances. Concerns over the homogenisation of cities and the destruction of social and historical urban fabric had already taken root in the 1960s, leading to vigorous academic and mainstream debates about the “urban question”. Authors such as Jane Jacobs were influential in such debates but have also since been heavily critiqued for their own positionality and blind spots with regards to the intersectionalities of urban injustice.

A nostalgic view of squatters’ communities, authentic neighbourhoods or other ways of living, born from a longing for one’s childhood, a desire for homecoming or simply better days gone by, is a relatable impulse in a world that seems to slip ever more quickly through our fingers. But perhaps a deep dive into what sustains certain communities, sometimes against powerful odds, would be a more fruitful avenue of critique. What does urban resistance look like? What lessons can be drawn from such communities that might offer hope for different ways of city-making? What can photography uncover when we look closely, and listen carefully alongside?

Cities have always been sites of struggle. In the words of the highly influential urban theorist Henri Lefebvre, they are ‘conflictual and dialectical, open to becoming, to encounters (both fearful and pleasurable), and to the perpetual pursuit of unknowable novelty’. The struggle is about shaping our cities after ‘our heart’s desire’. But it is this freedom to struggle, to even be part of the city to begin with, that is increasingly under pressure today. In many ways, we already know the answer to the question: “Who owns the city?”. But how we exert our right to it, how we protect, assert and demand our urban freedoms, is a far bigger task. Any effort to grapple with such questions – through photography or otherwise – can only begin from a critical place of situated and intersectional understanding, and an open-ended engagement with both place and people. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Foam, Amsterdam © Sem Langendijk.

Installation views of Haven at Foam 3h, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, until 18 June.

Images:

6>10-Installation views of Haven at Foam 3h, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, until 18 June.

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.

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.