Inhaltsverzeichnis für Winter 2015 in Aperture

Observing the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Truman Capote remarked, in a now famous quote, that the acclaimed photographer was “dancing along the pavement like an agitated dragonfly, three Leicas swinging from straps around his neck, a fourth one hugged to his eye: click-clickclick (the camera seems a part of his own body), clicking away with a joyous intensity, a religious absorption.” As Capote makes clear, the act of photographing is a performance. Indeed, from the early years of the medium, with Hippolyte Bayard’s 1840 staged Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, to contemporary artists using Instagram and other social-media platforms, the impulse to perform is threaded throughout photography’s history and evolution. This issue, a collaboration between Aperture and Performa, the nonprofit organization dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in…

K8 Hardy’s video Outfitumentary (2001–11/2015) is a montage of hundreds of self-portraits shot over the course of a decade in whatever location the Brooklyn-based artist happened to be living or working at the time. In one early scene, alone in her bedroom, she positions her video camera for a wide-angle shot, then leaps onto a chair and, standing in profile with one leg hoisted onto its back, gazes at the camera with a mix of ferocity and knowing wit. Dressed in a black-and-white checked miniskirt and red thrift-store tee with the sleeves ripped off, her hair in a flowy mullet, her look is a combination of DIY punk, ’90s indie, and femme lesbian, plus a dash of Texan dude. When I saw Outfitumentary in 2015, it hit a nerve. Hardy’s…

In Helena Almeida’s 1969 photograph Pink Canvas for Wearing, she is literally wearing a canvas, her arms wrapped in sleeves that seem to sprout from it. This is the first photograph of her career, after working for more than a decade as a painter since graduating from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon in 1955. In Lisbon’s close-knit art scene of the 1960s, her importance among the Portuguese avant-garde, which included artists Alberto Carneiro, Paula Rego, and Lourdes Castro (most of whom were living abroad, far from the Portuguese dictatorship that wouldn’t end until 1974), was confirmed by her solo show of three-dimensional canvases at Galerie Buchholz in 1967. Despite her increasing renown as a painter, Almeida’s delight at discovering that she could function as a painting through the…

As a teenage photographer and commercial portrait–studio owner in Bangui, Central African Republic, in the 1970s, Samuel Fosso took turns between client sittings in his studio to reel off self-portrait after self-portrait, modeling the fashion of the day: colorful platform shoes, bellbottomed pants, huge dark sunglasses, tight-fitted shirts, and blowout Jimmy Cliff rude-boy fisherman hats typical of postcolonial African urban youth of the period. Using his own body and the nonchalant, adventurous power that only a teenage studio proprietor could wield, Fosso produced a formidable look book of African urban youth style in the wealthy, immediate postindependence decade. After those images were discovered in the 1990s, their cultural significance brought Fosso into a vibrant circle of young African intellectuals: writers, international curators, and artists like Simon Njami and Bili Bidjocka,…

Zheng Mahler is the name of a collaboration between Royce Ng, a Chinese-Australian artist, and Daisy Bisenieks, an Australian anthropologist. Drawing from each other’s backgrounds, they apply anthropological approaches to making art and use artistic methodologies in the studies of anthropology. “It might be said that for every great ethnography ever written, there has been another unwritten book which includes the friendships, the gossip, the sex, the fear, and the failure of fieldwork,” the duo writes in response to a question about their work, which has included videos about Korean laborers and a musical based on an imaginary academic conference. “All that chaff which is sorted out by the scientific method, which ends up as lecture hall anecdote, seem to us to form the core of what artistic fieldwork or…

Ever since the onset of photography, the roles of the hand and the arm in making art have been subject to doubt. Once the definitive means of bringing an idea into form, these human appendages could seem feeble or quaint in an age of science and industry. Allowing gravity to participate in marking became a vital way to give art a deeper or more objective structure. Marcel Duchamp dropped threads to make the lines of his pivotal 1913–14 work 3 Standard Stoppages, and Jackson Pollock later dripped paint to push the limits of his control over line. These tactics called attention to art making as a performative grappling with chance and indifference. In his 1973 series Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six…

Devonté Hynes This photograph is from Flurina Rothenberger’s 2015 book I Love to Dress Like I Am Coming from Somewhere and I Have a Place to Go. It spans ten years of her photography (2004–14) in Africa. I was in the SoHo bookstore McNally Jackson with my friend who was buying it as a birthday gift for someone else. The images were instantly striking to me. Whereas other books and photographs of similar subject matter can come across as glorification or cultural tourism, I did not get that sense from looking at these pictures. I felt genuine respect and care for her subjects. This photograph, besides being visually so strong with its shapes and pastel colors, is full of so much joy and creativity. It shows a side of Africa…

In these classic volumes, art and science became one. The Vision + Value Series An electron micrograph of a virus. Ansel Adams’s photograph of magnetic core memory. A photograph of a thirteenth-century mosaic in Ravenna. What do these three images have in common? All of them look uncannily alike, and resemble patterns or graphs that emerge from mathematical exercises. And all are found in the Vision + Value series (1965–66), edited by Hungarian artist, photographer, designer, and theorist Gyorgy Kepes. In six beautifully illustrated volumes he sought to compile “the best knowledge of a given time.” Kepes explained how he admired the vast advances in the creation and circulation of knowledge that had taken place in the previous several decades, yet he lamented the separation between the eye, heart, and…

Performances are ephemeral; photographs are permanent. When is an image more than a mere document? How do images bring us closer to an event we never witnessed? Roxana Marcoci: RoseLee, you pioneered the study of performance art with a landmark book, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (1979), and recently expanded it with an account of the technological, political, and aesthetic shifts in performance art that have occurred since the turn of the new millennium. What do you think the advent of photography did for performance? And why have photography and performance been so intricately linked? From its beginnings, photography has had a unique relationship to performance, which explains why we can chart a history of modern and contemporary performance art, while it’s more difficult to do so for…

Over the past five years I’ve slowly returned to dance. When I was an undergraduate art student in the early 1970s, I spent a year studying and performing modern dance at the University of Pittsburgh. My immersion in dance was intense but short-lived. After dance, I moved to photography, which I took up full-time in 1976. In 2013 I began to make color photographs by placing three black-and-white photographs into the red, green, and blue color channels of Photoshop. The results were crude and not very appealing. Over the next year I refined the color management by using hue and saturation, selective color, gradient mapping, and channel-mixing adjustment layers. Each photograph is made this way. I copy a separate black-and-white photograph into one of Photoshop’s color channels and then fiddle…