Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2017 i Aperture

Radical Women at the Hammer Museum As part of the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, which will involve dozens of museums across Southern California, the Hammer will open a survey of more than one hundred female Latin American artists. Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 focuses on a turbulent twenty-five-year period when much of Latin America suffered under forms of military dictatorship, and the emboldened work of female artists, in particular, challenged the status quo. While the work ranges across a wide variety of practices, a number of important artists celebrated for their photography, including Liliana Porter, Regina Silveira, and Paz Errázuriz, will be featured. Walker Evans at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art A major retrospective of Walker Evans’s vernacular style comes to San Francisco this fall and…

Saturated with references to the lives of African Americans, Leslie Hewitt’s work explores the poetics of visual history, its absences, and its mysterious narratives. In her series of constructed images Riffs on Real Time (2006–9), Hewitt overlaid found snapshots of everyday people onto ephemera, including pages from Ebony magazine. Her photographs, often presented in sculptural installations, function as portals into memory, where historic scenes mingle with personal lives. Eva Hesse: Diaries, 2016 Mon. Be stronger—say no. —Eva Hesse, 1964 Each entry from the beautiful object that is Eva Hesse: Diaries is a strange yet paralleling space between a finished and unfinished thought. Her objects and drawings in a similar way give room to the viewer, inviting a proximity of intimacy and engagement. How much to reveal and what should remain…

In 1998, I traveled to Bamako for the first time to attend the third edition of Bamako Encounters: African Biennale of Photography. At the time, I was an independent curator based in London, and was thus humbled and refreshed to learn that a space existed on the continent for presenting the work of photographers of African descent—many of whom had yet to gain recognition in the West. Since that eye-opening experience, I’ve followed the evolution of the Bamako Biennale, the longest running platform for photography in Africa, by attending nearly every subsequent edition in various capacities—as a spectator, presenter, curator, and, most recently, in 2015, as the artistic director for the tenth edition. Titled Telling Time, this edition marked a milestone in the Biennale’s history on a number of levels.…

“I really could use a break right now!” Phumzile Khanyile said in February. The Soweto-born photographer was slumped on the step of a ladder, supervising the installation of Plastic Crowns, her exhibition of self-portraits, which, in twenty-four hours, would inaugurate the new premises of Johannesburg’s Market Photo Workshop. Earlier this year, the school of photography founded in 1989 on gut intuition and an activist impulse by David Goldblatt— a stoic chronicler of everyday life under apartheid and the transformations that have reshaped South African society since the first democratic elections in 1994—relocated from its former home in a cramped, retrofitted post office to its current location on the eastern side of Mary Fitzgerald Square. Jodi Bieber, a documentary photographer who started her career there in the early 1990s after picking…

The photographs in Abdo Shanan’s series Diary: Exile (2014–16) take viewers by the hand and race them through a vertiginous world of gritty, everyday intimacies. Imagine Nan Goldin and Diane Arbus meeting Roger Ballen in the inner cities of twentyfirst- century Algeria to produce work that none of them had the background or experience to perceive. More often than not, Shanan frames his images from above or below. He points his camera up to catch a shredded campaign poster or the face of a woman laughing, down to catch a splash of white paint on the sidewalk, a hand on a leopard-print coat, or a pair of lovers rolling on the ground. In Shanan’s series, there are friends, strangers, twins, soiled bedsheets, signs of poverty, hardship, and distress, as well…

“He was a very well-dressed man,” Regie Alonge, son of Solomon Osagie Alonge, the first official photographer to the royal court of Benin, Nigeria, recalled. “Everyone knew him for that. He was always wearing a suit.” Across a career spanning sixty years, from the 1930s to the 1990s, Alonge (1911–1994) photographed politicians, ceremonies, and festivals. In 1942, he opened the Ideal Photo Studio in Benin City. “Just a one-man business,” his son, who now lives in New York, called it, although there was always a flurry of apprentices and assistants. “We developed print photographs in the darkroom with our hands. No gloves!” For some of Alonge’s subjects, a visit to Ideal Photo Studio marked their first time being photographed. “Alonge provided local residents with the opportunity to represent themselves as…

Bamako, the capital of Mali, is situated along both sides of the Niger River and figures as a dynamic trade hub where diverse cultural and social influences converge. Due to an ongoing rural exodus in Mali, Bamako is one of the continent’s fastest growing urban areas. Like other African cities, it can be described as a complex configuration, in which the “postcolonial condition” manifests itself and is constantly renegotiated in various social, political, and cultural formations. Within this context, artists play an active role, consciously mirroring and questioning the places where they live. Emerging photographers are engaged with the city of Bamako, presenting contemporary outlooks on the urban environment and the experiences within it. Amsatou Diallo, Mamadou Sekou Kone, Oumou Traore, Aboubacar Traore, Seydou Camara, and Fatoumata Diabate, all in…

There’s something achingly poetic and yet unsettling about Sabelo Mlangeni’s work. This paradox is a reflection of the Johannesburg-based photographer’s approach: a soul quite quiet, though audible in its silence. Because of this innate calm, Mlangeni succeeds in taking both subjects and audience into his confidence. A Zen-like trait gifts his work with a sense of welcoming reassurance. On the other hand, his images convey a deeply satisfying, even ugly-beauty sensibility that is ultimately autobiographical. Their realism and presence are entrenched in Mlangeni’s reluctance to press your face against the pulse of the city where he walks and shoots. There’s also something raw yet elegant here. Raw as in unfinished, although you cannot tell what exactly is missing. And the elegance of composition. The minimalist knack of uncluttering an already…

Délio Jasse is something of an archive addict. While browsing through a flea market in Lisbon, he came across boxes of old documents from the 1960s that belonged to a Portuguese family living in Nampula, a province of Mozambique, which was at that time a colony of Portugal. There were photographs, but also bank statements, documents, and letters that allowed Jasse to examine their blithe lifestyle within the context of a more official standpoint, a process he likened to an archaeological dig to rebuild identity. “It’s as though I really knew these people and photographed them all myself,” says Jasse. “I sort through old stamps, bills, labels, and pay attention to every detail in the pictures. In the end, I invent stories about these people and look at the labels…

LagosPhoto There’s a character in “Lawless,” a short story by the Nigerian author Sefi Atta, who asks, “Who was I to think that art could save anyone in Lagos?” Azu Nwagbogu might have wondered this a decade ago when he founded the African Artists’ Foundation, an organization that coordinates the LagosPhoto Festival. Every year since 2010, Nwagbogu has organized the monthlong festival in Lagos, Nigeria. The photographers invited and the images exhibited are of an international scope, and the approach and attitude is pan-African. The festival’s themes are determined yearly by a curatorial team— a “factory of ideas,” he calls it—who are joined by guest curators. “It is a platform that relates especially to showcasing a new way of negotiating African contemporary visual history and culture,” Nwagbogu says. Through its…

It all began with the high heels. In 1976, as a precocious teenager, Samuel Fosso traveled from Bangui, Central African Republic, where he operated his own photography business called Studio Photo Gentil, to visit his family in Nigeria. There he discovered a pair of platform boots similar to those worn by the popular Nigerian highlife musician Prince Nico Mbarga on the cover of his record albums. Fosso’s grandmother agreed to buy him the boots, and upon returning to Bangui he completed the look, ordering a pair of bell-bottoms from a local tailor. “I put on my new outfit and went out. In the street, I ran into a priest who said, ‘You look handsome. You look like an astronaut. Do you want to reach heaven?’ And I answered, ‘Yes!’” For…

When Zola Maseko’s film Drum was released in 2004, its poster featured the iconic red-and-white masthead of the eponymous South African newsmagazine, beneath which ran the tagline, “THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.” The American actor Taye Diggs plays the trailblazing investigative reporter and editor Henry Nxumalo; Gabriel Mann plays the photographer Jürgen Schadeberg; and the scenes of 1950s Sophiatown, a black area of Johannesburg, are shot through with a heady sense of stylish nostalgia for an era of fearless truth telling and high fashion. Such was the legend of Drum that, forty years after its golden age, the magazine would be subjected to a Hollywood-style reincarnation. “Drum was the first to show the other side of the coin,” the journalist Arthur Maimane recalled in 1989. “The black side of…

What is a photographic synonym? Can one image stand in for another? How do these subtle slips of meaning and understanding, so fundamental to language, work visually? For South African artist Nico Krijno, the game of comparing, translating, and constructing affinities plays out in buoyant pictures arranged in whimsical sequences. Fresh tropical flowers are set against busy textiles; mismatched push-button telephones sit playfully, like interlocking slinkys, on concrete steps. When gathered together in books, including Synonym Study (2014) and New Gestures (2016), the experimental energy of these images shows a manic attention to the contiguities of perception, leaving much for the eye to linger over and around—exuberant colors, clashes of textures and patterns, unlikely juxtapositions, and visual paradoxes that twist our sense of logic and perception. There have been fires…