Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2019 i Aperture

Encore The past is prologue at the Getty, where, in the exhibition Encore: Reenactment in Contemporary Photography, seven artists assume the guises of figures from political, personal, or art-historical memory. Yasumasa Morimura inserts himself into a Manet. Samuel Fosso channels the spirits of civil rights–era icons and African independence leaders. Christina Fernandez re-creates the story of her mother’s migration from Mexico to California, along the way adopting vernacular modes of twentieth-century photography. For artists from Yinka Shonibare MBE to Gillian Wearing, performance is central. As exhibition curator Arpad Kovacs notes, each “revises source materials from the past, either visual or written documents, or family narratives, and acts them out for the camera.” Encore: Reenactment in Contemporary Photography at the Getty, Los Angeles, March 12–June 9, 2019 John Goodman As a…

When Aperture commissioned Carolyn Drake this past September to photograph the recent wildfires in Northern California, it seemed as if a severe season of destruction had finally concluded. Months passed. As we prepared to go to press with this issue in November 2018, a fresh wave of apocalyptic fires surged across parts of the state, killing dozens, displacing thousands. Hundreds more remained missing. Photographs tend to fall short when faced with such devastation. But Drake’s austere images of ravaged landscapes point to the role of people in creating the conditions for this new, terrifying normal. William Finnegan, who was raised in the state, reminds us that we are in uncharted territory. “It is the Anthropocene,” he says, referring to our geological age defined by human activity. “We must look to…

The word Anthropocene is quickly becoming part of everyday language. Describing the epoch already upon us, in which human actions are the determining factor in shaping Earth’s geology and ecosystems, the sound of the word alone connotes the gravity of its meaning. Bleak reports of the catastrophic impact of climate change appear with regularity in a moment when politicians blithely deny climate science. Despite current evidence and long-term projections of severe environmental and economic costs, humans are failing to solve a problem of their own creation. Photography has a long tradition of engagement with the environment, whether providing evidence of exploitation or modeling reverence for the wilderness. In our precarious times, what is the role of visual culture in grappling with a crisis of such magnitude? T. J. Demos has…

Imagine a lonely warrior slumped over his horse, backlit by a sun setting over rolling hills, or a group of warriors riding off toward the horizon. It isn’t hard for most people to conjure because we have been raised on these romantic images of the so-called vanishing Indian. Photography, which developed hand in hand with colonialism, has largely been responsible for the continued stereotype of the noble savage. What “Indians” are admired for—the idea of being one with nature, one with the land and animals—is also seen as the source of their inferiority and inevitable demise. It is given as the main reason they are unable to survive in modern society: “Indians” are part of nature, not civilization, and, by extension of this argument, less than human. American photographers in…

From her home in Cape Town, where she’s lived for the last six years, Dutch artist Thirza Schaap can walk to the ocean in seven minutes. The waters are wild and cold there, too rough for leisurely swimming. Drawn to them nonetheless, Schaap began walking the beaches with her black-and-white poodle, Iso, and was struck by the perpetual mass of plastic debris washing up on the shore, often caught up in watery strands of seaweed. It always looks, she says warmly, “like there has been a party.” In 2016, Schaap started photographing found plastic sculptures and sharing her pictures on social media. As response to the work grew, she carved out a daily habit, foraging for plastic while out on morning rambles, then going home and making fanciful, pastel-hued arrangements…

On October 19, 2018, to mark the Indian festival of Dussehra, the prime minister of India ceremonially shot an arrow into a giant effigy of Ravana—the enemy of Rama, the eponymous hero of the ancient Indian epic the Ramayana. Ravana’s effigy was installed in Delhi, where thousands had gathered to watch this mythic spectacle of the destruction of evil. By some pyrotechnical sleight of hand, the prime minister’s arrow, although missing its target, officially set off a blaze of firecrackers concealed inside Ravana’s body that could not have had a salutary effect on the capital’s already lethal air-quality index. Never mind if some of the nation’s environmentally concerned citizens have been fighting a vain battle to get the burning of festive firecrackers banned by the country’s highest court. Like the…

More than twenty years have passed since the release of John Waters’s film Pecker (1998), which tells the story of an aspiring photographer, played by Edward Furlong, whose deliciously gritty black-and-white images of the characters and happenings in Baltimore’s Hampden neighborhood catch the eye of a New York gallerist. Much hullabaloo follows—critics rave over his debut show; an arts writer calls his friends and family “culturally challenged” in the newspaper; his grandmother Memama appears on the cover of Artforum; the Whitney Museum of American Art offers him a show, to be titled A Peek at Pecker; and, eventually, the great and good of the New York art world end up partying in Baltimore, where Pecker decides to stage his own show. The film remains a cult favorite and one in a…

Death, like the tsunami about to usher it ashore, moves toward her. She is standing unaware outside a grocery store in the city of Natori. She can’t see the ten-foot waves cresting in the Pacific Ocean. She doesn’t feel the seismic plates shifting, scraping, subducting, or lifting the sea floor approximately eighty miles away. All she knows is what they told her: tsunamis do not happen in Kitakama village, where the sandy coastline near her studio runs straight and narrow. Then the Great East Japan Earthquake hits on March 11, 2011, the first blow of the “triple disaster” that will claim more than 15,500 lives. But photographer Lieko Shiga, alone in a parking lot, twenty miles from the village, doesn’t realize this yet. When the aftershocks subside, Shiga runs inside…

For more than three decades, the German artist Thomas Struth has made photographs of startling clarity and precision. He approaches his subjects—New York streetscapes and South Korean skylines, German families and Queen Elizabeth II, the Louvre and Disneyland—with the objective eye of a journalist and the meticulous composition of a painter. Associated with the Düsseldorf School of Photography, which emerged in Germany, in the 1970s, under the teaching of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Struth’s work is also connected to the psychological depth of August Sander’s portraits and the conceptual rigor found in the paintings of Gerhard Richter, his former mentor. Struth’s recent book Nature & Politics (2016) extends his fascination with natural landscapes into a critique of human engagement with the planet, looking at the built environment. On an uncharacteristically…

This portfolio by German artist Jochen Lempert includes a photograph, Untitled (Botticelli IV) (2018), of a detail from a Botticelli painting. It also includes Anna Atkins (2011), a photogram of a computer screen displaying a cyanotype by Anna Atkins in a web browser. I can think of few artists whose manner of documenting “nature” encompasses a broader definition of the term, or, for that matter, a more varied means of capturing images. Lempert came to his approach from the world of science. During the 1980s and early ’90s, after studying biology at university, he worked on research projects in Europe, Africa, and on the North Sea, tracking bird populations and authoring academic studies of dragonfly species. At the same time, he collaborated with artists in Hamburg on experimental films and…

What are billboards if not large-scale collages? Set against the backdrop of a city street, exurban landscape, or empty sky, the billboard opens a mail-slot aperture in reality through which we glimpse other vistas, gleaming bodies, new machines, and gobbets of hectoring or seductive text. As is typical in photomontage, everything is in focus, but the planes of two realms—or more than two, when billboards crowd together—abut each other to flummoxing ends. Seen on the move, at speed, along the edges of a highway, the billboard itself looks mobile—it makes the most mundane journey seem cinematic. In Bruno V. Roels’s series Fake Billboards (2018), this sense of the billboard as an icon of modernity (or postmodernity) in motion is still present, up to a point. But there is something more…

Before you’ve seen the West, you’ve seen the West—landscape photographs of the region, especially those by Ansel Adams, are so deep in our nation’s collective imagination that you have to work to actually see Half Dome, in California, or Shiprock, in New Mexico, even when you’re standing there with your hiking boots on. David Benjamin Sherry’s recent pictures help us see again. Sherry is known for his fascination with color, for his analog techniques, and for what some have called his “queer revision” of the rugged and macho legacy of western landscape photography. His images of several national monuments, photographed last year, carry the same level of detail as Adams’s iconic pictures, the sublime clarity of the haze-free western summer afternoon. But drenched in unexpected and unreal color, they get…

Participating Galleries # 10 Chancery Lane 303 Gallery 47 Canal A Miguel Abreu Acquavella Aike Alisan Anomaly Antenna Space Applicat-Prazan Arario Alfonso Artiaco Artinformal Aye B Balice Hertling Beijing Art Now Beijing Commune Bergamin & Gomide Bernier/Eliades Blindspot Blum & Poe Boers-Li Tanya Bonakdar Isabella Bortolozzi Ben Brown Gavin Brown Buchholz C Gisela Capitain Cardi Carlos/Ishikawa Chambers Chemould Prescott Road Yumiko Chiba Chi-Wen Sadie Coles HQ Contemporary Fine Arts Continua Paula Cooper Pilar Corrias Alan Cristea Chantal Crousel D Thomas Dane Massimo De Carlo de Sarthe Dirimart du Monde E Eigen + Art Eslite Gallery Exit Experimenter Selma Feriani Fortes D‘Aloia & Gabriel Fox/Jensen G Gagosian Gajah gb agency Gladstone Gmurzynska Goodman Gallery Marian Goodman Gow Langsford Bärbel Grässlin Richard Gray Greene Naftali Karsten Greve Grotto H Hakgojae Hanart TZ…

Every fire has a narrative. For major wildfires, there are numbers to help frame the narrative, and usually a name. But all fires start long before they start, in the sense that the ground must be prepared, literally, for the conflagration to come. Fuel, weather (and behind weather, climate), the natural landscape, the built landscape, suppression efforts past and present, prevention schemes, politics—these factors and many others, interacting and colliding, create a context and prehistory for each major fire. The fire itself burns and then takes its place both in recorded history and in the natural history of its epoch. That epoch, now, is the Anthropocene—the epoch of a world made by humans. To make these images in California’s disaster-struck areas, Carolyn Drake chose the long moments after a series…

There is a description in J. G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World of iguanas perched in the windows of office blocks after a flood inundates London. Bizarre as this image might have seemed in 1962, when the novel was published, such menacing symbols of our disastrous stewardship of the planet are no longer the stuff of postapocalyptic novels, as Gideon Mendel will attest. He has traveled to such scenes in thirteen countries, making photographs for Drowning World (2007–ongoing), his project about the global effects of flooding. Watermarks (2014–18), one of several series in the project, was set in motion when Mendel was in Haiti in 2008. When his two Rolleiflex cameras were accidentally submerged, he continued working, shooting forty rolls of film with cameras that were rusting from the inside…

In summer 2016, Arguiñe Escandón sent Yann Gross, a Swiss photographer who often works in the Amazon, a postcard with a photograph by Charles Kroehle. It was one of many pictures the German photographer made while documenting Peru between 1888 and 1891. Escandón, a Spaniard and a photographer herself, added a friendly warning: “I hope you won’t end up like him.” Although much is known about Georg Hübner, the German ethnographer and photographer with whom Kroehle traveled in eastern Peru, Kroehle’s fate has been open to speculation—some say he disappeared after he was shot with a poisonous arrow in the rain forest. As Escandón and Gross considered their predecessors’ earlier photographs, they saw an opportunity to make collaborative work. Almost a century and a half later, they traveled in Peru…

In the summer of 1978, Lois Gibbs, a resident of the upstate New York community of Love Canal, discovered that her child’s elementary school was built on top of a chemical waste dump. Her kindergarten-age son had been suffering from frequent recurring illnesses, including liver disorders, epilepsy, asthma, and urinary issues. Mobilized by the suspicion that these circumstances were somehow interlinked, Gibbs formed the Love Canal Parents Movement. What began as a simple canvassing effort would later evolve into one of the nation’s best-known grassroots environmental campaigns. Nearly a decade later, activists formed the National Toxics Campaign (NTC), an organization committed to supporting local environmental causes, similar to what Gibbs and the Love Canal community had accomplished, on a national scale. The NTC began publishing a newsletter called Toxic Times…