Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2021 i Aperture

Samuel Fosso “I did not know I was making art photography. What I did know was that I was transforming myself into what I wanted to become,” the shape-shifting photographer Samuel Fosso said in an interview with the late curator and critic Okwui Enwezor. Fosso’s iconic studio self-portraits—in which the Cameroonian-born, Nigerian photographer transforms himself into such characters as a liberated American woman, a colonial-era chief, or a fashion avatar—are presented by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, in a career retrospective. The exhibition spans Fosso’s earliest works from the 1970s, made when he was a teenager in the Central African Republic, to his late 1990s collaboration with Vogue Paris, staged portraits of Black leaders across the diaspora, and recent Polaroid studies of his emotional states. Samuel Fosso at…

As an English major in college in the 1980s, I studied the then-recognized masters of modern poetry: Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot. At first, I thrilled at learning the commandments of high art, but as I commenced reading the “greats” in earnest, I felt something unnatural happening to me—a rift between my life with my immigrant family, who had crossed the border in the 1960s, and these devotions to the aesthetics of white American men. Tomás Rivera was not in my curriculum, nor was Langston Hughes or Countee Cullen, Gloria Anzaldúa or Estela Portillo-Trambley. I had not yet heard of these authors, some of whom had been publishing in the United States for over a half century. I wrote my treatise on the mid-twentieth-century poetry…

The electrifying, unpredictable sweep of historical change! And … the soul-crushing monotony of showing up every day for a job you may not like. Sofía Córdova’s GUILLOTINÆ Wanna Cry, Act Yellow: Break Room (2019–21), a three-channel, twenty-five-minute film installation, toggles between these seemingly incommensurate experiences, depicting both the elation of collectivity and the frustrations of social and physical isolation. Córdova, an artist based in Oakland, California, trained as a photographer and now works in performance and video. In GUILLOTINÆ, she brings a quartet of dancers, one of whom is the artist herself, into a yellow room, juxtaposing their actions against photographs and film footage of revolutionary events. As Córdova describes the historical sources: “Some are bombastic speeches, but this might unspool into Cuban revolutionaries talking about hardship, about sharing a…

I don’t have any pictures of my family in my home. My spouse has a photograph of us and our dog, on our bookcase, I think. I don’t keep images of my parents or brother on my phone. Pictures of family are a source of terror for me because they remind me of the people I love too much, and the people I love are the most vulnerable beings I know. I am an artist and can only ease their suffering so much. Adelante (2018–ongoing), a series by Steven Molina Contreras, who was born in El Salvador in 1999 and grew up on Long Island, chronicles his jumping-bean dynamics with his family—his mother, father, stepfather, grandparents, sisters. The images are hard to look at because so much is familiar in…

If you are a Black Latinx immigrant living in the Global North, translation—linguistic, historical, political, and cultural—shapes your experiences of belonging and unbelonging in the diaspora. In his new series Archive Intervention (Google Translate) (2021), based on images of U.S. anti-Black violence, the artist Marton Robinson brings attention to the absurdity of simplifying Black experiences through hegemonic notions of belonging. Using software such as Google Translate, Robinson, whose interdisciplinary multimedia work includes video, performance, photography, and textual manipulation, highlights the mistranslations of anti-Black violence while simultaneously intervening in the archive. By bending, twisting, and inscribing the archival document with words and images that quite literally mess with the historical legacy of anti-Blackness, Robinson forces us to recognize its perdurance, expansion, and migrations across languages, geographies, and histories. Archive Intervention takes…

Despite the nearby highway’s asphalt and concrete pillars, the overpasses and bridges, despite the litter and traffic noise, the Rio Hondo remembers, in the depths of night, to roll its fog into the San Gabriel Valley of Greater Los Angeles. Across the river, up its banks, the fog spills onto the 60 Freeway, carrying the water’s wet, green scent like a strange yet familiar song. The Rio Hondo carries still, in its damp breath, the ancient memories of its first Indigenous inhabitants, along with the Spanish missionaries it flooded and victoriously swept away. It remembers, as some people still do, the old barrios with families who bathed their babies and watered their horses at its rounded-rock beaches. Certainly, the river remembers the late Chicana photographer Laura Aguilar, who lived near…

Last summer, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with many museums in between, were rightly criticized for their responses to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others at the hands of police and to the protests sparked by those tragedies. Several institutions searched their collections and used artworks by Black artists, without permission, in social media posts. Some paired images with statements that did not directly condemn the killings or adequately acknowledge the pain in their communities. As Kimberly Drew, a writer and formerly the social media manager for the Metropolitan Museum, put it on Twitter, “I understand firsthand that finding something to say can be hard work. I am also saying that I would like to see you do…

On the hot and humid afternoon of May 10, 1974, in Dallas, Texas, my mother, Dolores, known to everyone as Lollie, visited with my great-grandfather Juan Sosa, who went by the anglicized name of John. My mother brought John his lunch as he lay bedridden from illness and age. She told him that she was pregnant and going to have a daughter. He cried, perhaps realizing he would never see the baby, and with tears in his eyes said, “How wonderful, mija.” She left the room, and when she returned shortly after to pick up his tray, he had passed away. I was born four months later. Although I never knew John, I always liked to imagine his last encounter with my mother and felt connected to him through that…

In the early morning hours of January 29, 1972, Rito Canales and Antonio Cordova were shot dead by police at a construction site in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Police alleged that, while attempting to steal dynamite, the two exchanged shots with officers, leaving both men fatally wounded. Almost fifty years later, the details of this incident are exasperatingly familiar: excessive use of deadly force by law enforcement, a dubious official account, and a city with an entrenched culture of discriminatory policing that provoked fear, anger, and mistrust among its Latinx residents. Familiar, too, were the efforts of activists to confront and dismantle this system. As it happens, Canales and Cordova were both deeply involved in the Chicano movement as members of Las Gorras Negras (the Black Berets), a social justice organization…

Vincent Ramos is part of a long-standing artistic tradition of engaging with archival materials that are orphaned and displaced from official history. He collects ephemera of Latinx and Latin American actors and public figures, mostly promotional materials—advertisements, sheet music, press photographs—that he finds on eBay or at flea markets. By incorporating the bizarre and stereotypical, the collector-artist also addresses problematic aspects of representation. Whether it be members of the Monkees in bandido garb, Les Paul’s riff on “Vaya Con Dios,” or a range of “south of the border” iconography, this gathering and restaging of materials is more a summoning of cultural attitudes that, for many, continue to inform opinions about Latinx populations. Unofficial modes of historical documentation have made their way into far-ranging art practices, from Judy Baca’s epic mural…

Once, in the ocean, or rather in the cloudy neither-nor close to shore, a creature I had not seen but must have got too close to shot a line of ink in my direction through the shallows. It hung in the water like a message. Later I learned that kind of ink jet is called a pseudomorph, a false body, allowing the animal to escape unharmed under cover of its own calligraphic shadow. These photographs by Tarrah Krajnak perform a similar maneuver. Though the artist figures in each one, they are not so much self-portraits as projections from some inner darkroom. Enigmatic compositions face their negatives as if in a black mirror, yielding geometries of disorienting doubleness. Smoky, spectral, at times almost abstract, they appear to present a figure advancing…

Who’s she smiling at? What’s she selling? What’s she hiding? She’s wearing the Caribbean blue sea. The hills. The palm trees. The flower: a third eye. Joiri Minaya created Woman-landscape (On Opacity) #4 (2020) as part of a series in which she collages vintage postcards advertising the Dominican Republic, superimposing samples of commercially available “tropical prints” and archival images in a way that strategically obscures an easy knowability of the subject. Minaya, born in New York and raised in the Dominican Republic, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates the body within constructions of gender, identity, social space, and landscape, complicating hierarchies through hybridity, challenging otherness, and, most recently, thinking through opacity. It feels fitting to write about Minaya’s works from an airplane heading to Santo Domingo airport. From the…

The history of Latinx people in photography is sordid. Often, we are the subject of suspect representation: grotesque stereotypes and racialized images that pathologize Latinx bodies as hypersexualized, criminalized, diseased, derelict, or dead. For the most part, the camera hasn’t been good to us. As photographic technologies developed from the mid-nineteenth into the twentieth century, so too did the ease with which depictions of Latinx people could be produced in photography and film, and imprinted on the cultural imagination. To this very day, we still encounter Latinx stereotypes that first appeared in early forms of photography. A nuanced account of Latinx photography is also difficult to discover. It takes searching family holdings, scouring library collections, and chasing fugitive archives to bring Latinx people into the story of photography in a…

A tall, dark man guts a mattress with his bare hands. The mattress is laid flat on a black-and-white checkerboard linoleum floor in a row house. This is London, September 1966, amid the “Destruction in Art Symposium,” organized by Gustav Metzger. Over the course of the event’s weeks-long programming, the New York–born artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz, then known as Ralph Ortiz, tore into armchairs, pianos, and a mattress; led audiences in paper bag concerts; and performed Self-Destruction at the Mercury Theatre, a performance that inspired primal-scream therapy. Ortiz’s various destructions in public spaces, arts venues, and a family home fascinated the London press. The Daily Mirror summed up these destructions in photographic terms: “This, in case there is any doubt in your mind, is a picture of an artist at…

Born and raised in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights, the artist Gregory Bojorquez has created an impressive photographic archive of his family, friends, and neighbors. He tends to always have his camera ready, taking photographs of the people and places he encounters each day. “I like photographing people who haven’t really been photographed a lot,” he says. Indeed, most of Bojorquez’s images have focused on alternative communities. His East Siders series, made in the 1990s and 2000s, features urban Chicano scenes of East LA, including streetscapes of liquor stores, fast food restaurants, and graffiti-tagged walls, along with numerous portraits from party crews, gangs, and local outdoor gatherings. The city has changed dramatically in the decades since Bojorquez started the series, and he has since shifted his camera to…

From the flickering images of runway shows on the Style Network and a steady stream of music videos, a young Gabriela Ruiz filed away the visuals that would one day inspire her artwork. “The TV was a babysitter of mine,” the artist says. Even now, Ruiz will rewatch some of the videos that made an impression on her at a young age, transporting herself to past moments in order to spark new ideas in her bold, saturated present. Growing up in LA’s San Fernando Valley with Mexican immigrant parents, Ruiz absorbed a “DIY work ethic,” as her website states, that would go on to permeate her multimedia, performance-based practice and her signature elaborate costuming. Fashion was once a defense mechanism for the artist, a way to guard against bullies. In…

In Reynaldo Rivera’s life there are three fires, two of which nearly wiped out his life’s work. Rivera has been taking photographs for the majority of his life: of friends, lovers, strangers, performers, and those who watch them, mostly in and around Los Angeles. Some document the sun-cracked landscapes and ladies who cleaned the SRO hotel rooms he stayed at in Stockton, California, where, as a teen, he worked seasonally in a Campbell’s soup cannery to support his picture taking and glam thrift habit. Later, as his world grew, he would take pictures in Mexico, Europe, Central and South America, but it’s mainly his photographs of LA scenes in the 1980s and 1990s that are driving an unprecedented institutional interest in his work. These images interpolate every facet of the…

Winter breath is captured like a floating, vaporous orb in a woman’s cupped hand. A secret is passed clandestinely between best friends in a restaurant. One silhouetted figure braids another’s hair in an attempt to tame wild curls in the rising humidity of summer. Shoulders and ear lobes are tenderly caressed among a circle of women. Throughout these frames, gesture becomes a unifying thread. Gesture is a method that allows the photographer Genesis Báez to explore the complexity of care, touch, and belonging among the diasporic communities of Puerto Rican women in the Northeast United States and beyond. In each of these photographs, Báez experiments with how gesture can be a language used to express something that has no form. “I like to think about how gesture and touch can…