Aperture -julkaisun Winter 2018 -irtonumeron sisällysluettelo

In one image from Motoyuki Daifu’s series Project Family (2007–ongoing), the photographer’s mother eats at a table that’s practically overflowing with vessels of all kinds: bowls, bags, coffee mugs, sauce bottles, food containers, a small tub of candy. The table tilts slightly upward, producing the vertiginous feeling that everything might just slide off and into the viewer’s space. The aggressive and nonchalant combination of vibrant colors, a mountain of domestic clutter, and a figure hardly paying any attention to the camera characterize Daifu’s series, which he calls an exploration of “the extraordinary within the ordinary.” His work plays across these two areas of experience, at times gleefully mixing them together. Daifu started working on Project Family while living with his mother, father (a professional photographer), and four siblings in a…

What is a grown man supposed to do with his mother? Ignore her. Help her. Visit her dutifully. Keep an emotional and intellectual distance. Bring the grandchildren around to show. Suffer with a plastic smile through Thanksgiving dinners. Keep the thick and invisible wall between grown child and mature parent in its place. To do anything else is a taboo that we do not even talk about. But the heart-stopping fear and wonder and sometimes disgust that Charlie Engman’s portraits of his mother engender in the viewer make this taboo plain. To make art with someone else (as Engman and his mother make these photographs together) is always to engage in an intimate exchange of mind, body, spirit, heart. Why should it be so shocking to see this intimacy happen…

In October 1996, the Armenian American photographer Diana Markosian was seven years old, living with her family in Moscow, when her mother told her and her brother to pack their things; they were going on a trip. She didn’t say where. “We left immediately,” Markosian told me recently, “without even saying goodbye to our father.” They landed in a new world that felt completely foreign but eerily familiar too, almost as if it had been imprinted on her dreams. “I remember the sunlight streaming through the windows,” Markosian said. “All the palm trees. We walked through the airport, and everyone was smiling and wearing Disney hats, and shorts and sneakers, and eating hamburgers. My mother wore a white eyelet dress, and she was holding a picture of this older man.…

It took a picnic in New York’s Central Park for Coko Xtravaganza to understand what the House of Xtravaganza meant when they called each other family. Having been inducted into the crew in 1983—after discovering house members on the piers on Manhattan’s West Side and at the downtown nightclub Paradise Garage—Coko thought they were simply a group of friends with a name. “But Carlos and Tito used to throw an annual picnic for the house, and that was really the tipping point for me,” Coko, now the grandmother of the house, said during a recent photoshoot with photographer Stefan Ruiz. “That’s when the family thing really clicked, and I finally felt a part of something real. It came to the point where I would kill for one of them.” Founded…

In the turbulent Boston of the 1970s, a wild group of friends in the city’s art schools began looking at themselves and the people who populated their world. They began making images—characterized by a deceptive casualness—so that others could see what they saw. Among the photographers of the so-called Boston School—Nan Goldin with her vivid, lurid empathy; the Polaroid punk prophet Mark Morrisroe; wide-screen fabulist Philip-Lorca diCorcia; Gail Thacker, inspired by both positive and negative film; nightlife legend Tabboo!; Jack Pierson with his winking, just-shy-of-leering investigations of charisma—David Armstrong stands out. These pieces from his archive, mostly unpublished, have aged without accruing a patina of pathos. They are chosen family portraits. They are objects of love. Armstrong was born a queer, white, middle-class kid in the straight, white, middle-class suburbs…

In March 2018, in the popular tourist district of Kandy, Sri Lanka, a road-rage incident between a Buddhist man and a group of Muslim men unexpectedly escalated into days of mob violence. Religious extremist groups manipulated the incident and used it as an opportunity to spread hate speech, resulting in President Maithripala Sirisena imposing a state of emergency on the island nation, the first since the end of the civil war, nearly a decade ago, in 2009. But Kandy, or Kanda Uda Rata, as it was known before British colonization, is no stranger to the distortion of histories or the jostling of ideologies. Its dynastic kingdom was the country’s seat of power and religion from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, staving off successive attacks from local factions and European…

Posing for a family picture is often our introduction to the act of being photographed. Whether we want to participate or not, a family member with a camera or a studio photographer with a backdrop guides us into the frame and produces a memory. The genre has its tropes, its classics. Birthdays, graduations, weddings, anniversaries. Family vacations that we wanted to take—or run from. Even in its analog form, before we began actively crafting our representations for the public audience of social media, a family photo-album was a semiprivate curatorial exercise, one of careful image pairings and sequences, names and dates, omissions. “The family photograph is a marker of myths,” writes Glen Helfand. “It captures a fraction of a second of activity and fuels narratives for generations.” The peculiar power…

In 1993, the artist Glenn Ligon walked into Gay Treasures, a now defunct bookstore in Greenwich Village, New York, and purchased a box titled “Black Men,” a collection of pornographic images of men of color. The following year, in what would become A Feast of Scraps (1994–98), Ligon clustered the pictures—largely of the same man—with photographs from found family albums. There are ten pages and thirty-one images all together. One page holds photographs of a young couple gripping hands on a sofa and staring into one another’s gaze; a man standing alone in front of a curtain in a long trench coat, eyeing the camera sidelong; small, discrete portraits of a man in a suit and a woman on the telephone; and (the only color image) a nude young man…

The Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase is best known for his celebrated photobook Ravens (1986), a work in which he projected his sense of isolation and sadness, arising from his 1976 divorce, onto the figures of ravens. More than thirty years have passed since the publication of Ravens, and it is still lauded as one of the most monumental achievements of Japanese photography. But in 1992, Fukase suffered a traumatic brain injury that brought an end to all of his creative endeavors; it also resulted in the greater part of his photographic works, excepting Ravens, falling into oblivion for the next twenty-five years. Considerable scope remains for reassessing what Fukase was trying to accomplish in the course of his forty-year-long career as a photographer. Two works made over long stretches of…

At the beginning of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 short film, Le ballon rouge (The Red Balloon), a young boy, played by the director’s real-life son, rescues a lone red balloon from the top of a Parisian lamppost. The balloon, like a friendly ghost, carries him, and us, whimsically through the city and the day’s adventures. Though the film is entirely in color (the related book includes both color and black-and-white film stills), the glossy red orb bobs vividly against the muted palette of Paris streets and the drab grown-up world, a metaphor for the spirit of childhood resilience and imagination. Christopher Anderson’s ongoing documentation of his family—his wife, Marion, and their two children, Atlas and Pia—unfolds with the poetry, tonality, and cinematic drive of The Red Balloon. Beginning with the birth…

Shortly after midnight on June 14, 2017, a devastating fire tore through the Grenfell Tower public housing high-rise in West London. Seventy-two residents of the twenty-four-story building were killed in what was the most lethal blaze in postwar British history. Many Grenfell inhabitants were immigrants—first- and second-generation Africans and Arabs who had formed a disparate community in the building based on the common experience of departure from their homelands and arrival in Britain. They were the kind of people who had been vilified by tabloids and right-wing politicians over the past year of rancorous debate about Brexit. The kind of people, it was said, who were guilty of spreading crime, disease, and sharia law. As Katie Hopkins put it in a 2015 column for the Sun, “Some of our towns…

Justine Kurland: Ezekiel Stark, the gentle narrator in your novel Men and Apparitions (2018), is an ethnographer who studies family photographs. Why did you want to write a book about photography and family? Lynne Tillman: I didn’t set out to write so much about Zeke’s family. But as I built his character, it made sense psychologically that his interest in photographs and photography would have begun early. So I expanded the family’s interest, from his father’s passion for Polaroids to, on his mother’s side, the character Clover Hooper Adams, a nineteenth-century woman, the wife of the historian Henry Adams, and a professional photographer. In my own family, my father was the photographer and home-movie maker. I was the youngest, and quite younger than my two sisters. I liked to look…

When Sally Mann started photographing her kids and husband thirty years ago, it was probably the most interesting case of a photographer turning the lens on their immediate family since John William Draper covered his sister’s face in flour and made her sit perfectly still for sixty-five seconds in 1840. It may not be an exaggeration to say that Mann made us look at our own family members differently, as people we know intimately and, at the same time, as actors in a drama more vast and complicated than we can grasp or hope to control. She didn’t discover all of that, but she made it newly visible. Work of that power ought to produce progeny and spawn, and hers has. One of the most recent—and promising—cases is a woman…

“I have found no standard art history that refers to any Afro-American artist,” Deborah Willis wrote on November 14, 1973, in a statement about her intention to research the contributions of black photographers working in the United States from 1840 to 1940. After approaching a number of collections and libraries and drawing up a list that included Roy DeCarava, James VanDerZee, and Gordon Parks, she asked herself: “Could these black photographers receive the same recognition their white colleagues received?” This question has animated Willis’s influential books, essays, conferences, and curatorial projects concerning the relationship between African American identity and photography and has brought to the foreground the stories of black people as both makers and subjects of images, from Civil War–era portraits to contemporary photo-based art. For Willis, a distinguished…