Consider American artist Zoe Leonard’s recent photographs, presented in New York in an exhibition titled In the Wake. They depict family snapshots from the period after World War II when her forebears were stateless. The original images, taken as her family fled from Warsaw to Italy to London to the United States over the course of more than a decade, offer scenes of intimacy that contrast with the era’s international clashes and their messy aftermaths.
Read MoreI’m currently looking a lot at images like this, which are in a kind of hybrid state between the hyperreal and the abstract, between fact and fiction. It is perhaps not this particular photograph by Julian Faulhaber that fascinates me, but rather the type of photography it represents, images that with crystal clear sharpness depict something with a detailed and zealous attention and yet does not really reveal anything.
Read MoreThis photograph of young Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, was taken by an old man with a box camera on Coney Island in 1969. The image is used on the cover of Smith's book Just Kids, which revolves around the relationship between the two, and on how they together began their respective artistic careers.
Read MoreThis is an image still processing in my mind, which isn’t a photograph on its own but a documentation of a work I haven't experienced, but which I still try to interpret. Ivan Galuzin invited Eirin Støen for a one night only at Brown Dude Projectspace. I didn’t make it in time to Sørligata's old factory premises in Oslo, but I’m nevertheless bewitched by the work as a photograph.
Read MoreIn 2001, Nan Goldin took photographs of a couple, Jens and Clemens, somewhere in Paris. Back then, no one knew what to expect, because they were waiting for something else. Back then, love was enough in many ways. It was all still playing out to the soundtrack of the 90s, when walls, fences, eastern blocks and cheap techno music fell to the ground, allowing people to meet at eye level in places that needed an embrace.
Read MoreI am driving his car.
Somewhere, in the midst of those dark Scandinavian woods,
I pull over to the side of the road and make a complete stop.
Read MoreThis is everything that is wrong with the world and how dangerous photography can intersect with it. The idea of a conflict zone as a backdrop for an Annie Leibovitz shoot for Vouge is vile. Posing the “First Lady” against a destroyed airplane in which people presumably died. Depicting a politician as an icon hero without any nuanced understanding of their function and complicity in this 155 day old brutal war.
Read More…My colleague, wearing dark glasses for the occasion, doesn’t look convinced. While actors pretend they inhabit the space, doing everyday chores, he expresses his relief that the museum has finally opened, but points out that this show of artists not from the collection had become outdated even before it opened.
Read MoreI’ve loved this photograph for years. The tender way in which dog is portrayed sleeping over these rocks. The dog looks so gentle, almost like a floating figure. There’s a harsh beauty in the photograph, a tension between the delicate creature and the hardness of the vertical rocks.
Read MoreA few years ago, my companion over a hyper-inflated hotel breakfast was a loud Italian gesticulating furiously over the amount of food available and the inevitable waste. The hotel advertised itself as the most generous hotel breakfast of the north. The man was Oliviero Toscani, who in 1991 famously made an image for a billboard depicting a kissing nun and priest, promoting the clothing brand Benetton in Catholic Italy.
Read MoreIt is an image in a image. A woman holds a black and white photograph in one hand; in the other is an old Roloflex camera. One eye is looking through the camera, and the other is staring directly at us. Do we see and understand? In the black and white image she holds, a group of Black men sit on a stoop.
Read MoreThere is a book in my library, American Pictures by Jacob Holdt, that has followed me through every move I’ve made. Holdt became famous when he hiked around the USA in the 1970s with a small camera in his pocket. He spent the night where he could, documenting racism and inequality between black and white people.
Read MoreIn a year afflicted by the war in Ukraine, and by the remains of the pandemic, the Biennale in Venice did actually open. Cecilia Alemani curated the main exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, which takes its title from a book by Leonora Carrington. Alemani describes the book as a ‘magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination.
Read MoreI have always found the question, “Who do you think you are?” (used rhetorically, as an accusation) to be an odd one. The implication is that one should know oneself, or know one’s place, as if it were ever a question of knowing, and not just imagining. Nowhere can the gulf between one’s own self image and external appearances be revealed with such brutality as in the self portrait: there is no better stage for one’s self delusions.
Read MoreRodin's small bronze sculpture shows a seated woman. The posture is knotty, awkward, as if she is forced. One arm is stretched behind her back and she is seated a little askew. You can see the bones in the ribcage under the empty, hanging breasts. The shoulder joints protrude. She is skinny, but her belly is swollen under the wrinkled skin.
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Otto Dix, Bildnis der Journalistin Sylvia von Harden, 1926.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
‘But, where ARE you?,’ the lady sitting next to me screams into her iPhone. Dressed in black tights and something between a sweater and a dress, super stylish, she reminds me of Otto Dix’s Portrait of Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926). All that is missing is the cigarette and the cocktail. Suddenly, she yells ‘I AM HERE!!!!’, but offers no location or further explanation. People around her are giving her meaningful stares, intimating that she should speak in a lower voice or maybe not even speak at all. But we’re in a crowded, noisy café, so she doesn’t bother me.
I saw the painting by Dix at the Pompidou this fall. ‘People must gravitate around this lady’, I thought while studying it, ‘she looks as if she’s seen it all’. Von Harden, who worked as a journalist in Berlin in the 1920s, sits at a small table in the Romanische Café, on which sit a cocktail and a cigarette case. The museum writes about the painting: ‘the cold, satirical realism typifies the New Objectivity movement to which the painter belonged. Inspired by early 16th-century German masters (Cranach, Holbein), he embraced the tempera on wood panel technique as well as the choice to exhibit the ugliness of humankind.’ But she isn’t ugly to me. In her red-check sweater dress and dark red lipstick, cigarette in hand, she sits in her pink corner of the café as if she owns the place The only thing that doesn’t seem right to me in the image is that the painter has given her a stocking that is sagging around her knee. This small detail seems staged, falsely painted into the work by Dix. Somehow, it suggests prejudice against her, like that of the people annoyed by the noisy woman in the café next to me.
She’s done with her call now, and is busy gathering her things to leave. Maybe she’s going to meet the person she was talking to on the phone. I hope she doesn’t feel she has to go, or that she has to be quiet, to take up less space. I think we should do the opposite: be like Von Harden in the 1920s. Have a table of our own. Talk more and louder. Claim our space.
Afterimage by Margot Wallard:
I have an image that’s been on mind for many years. And I’m so fascinated by this image that I have it on the wall in my house. (I rarely put pictures on the wall).
It’s an archive family picture, a portrait of my grandparents when they were young in Algeria.
Archive pictures are attractive for obvious reasons, which is why I’m often wary of them. But this one is like an obsession for me. When I first saw it years ago, I was blown away and I still am whenever I look at it.
This is because it’s my grandparents from a time I never knew.
Because they seem foreign and yet so familiar to me.
Because it’s about the passage of time.
Because it’s about them as a couple as I’ve never known them.
Because it’s about them. How they pose in front of the camera.
Because it’s not only an old picture, it’s a magic picture. A magic moment.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
The idea of the recently published book The Photograph That Changed My Life is simple: over 50 photographers, musicians, collectors and actors are invited to ‘write from the heart’, as editor Zelda Cheatle explains in the blurp, about the most important photograph they have seen. Contributors include Adam Bromberg, Nan Goldin and David George.
The American photographer Alex Prager chose this still from Neša Paripović’s film N.P. 1977, in which the artist depicts his walk through Belgrade, as he moves with swift determination, taking shortcuts to get to wherever he is headed as fast as he can. The film was shown at Trondheim Kunsthall some years ago, and as the press release states, Paripović ‘uses the city as a mirror in which individual identity is constructed’. Prager writes that, having just begun producing scenes that walk a line between reality and artifice, she finds in this shot of Paripović’s leap across rooftops ‘the perfect balance of a meticulously staged scenario joined with the raw and wild’.
For this column, where every writer describes an image that they find impossible to get out of their mind, I’ve chosen this still, because it keeps me hanging on after having closed the book. This jump could end tragically, and those who haven’t seen the film don’t know the outcome. The uncertainty reminds me of the fate of the 75-year-old French adventurer Jean-Jacques Savin, who recently died while attempting to row across the Atlantic Ocean. Savin, who had crossed the ocean before in a large barrel, described the trip as a way to ‘laugh at old age’.
I was rooting for him to make the trip, since it would be a beautiful statement on the fact that age doesn’t matter. And even though he failed, it still is, since anyone could have died in the same conditions. Seen in this light, Paripović’s jump and hasty tour of the city also become a salute to the fact that anything is possible in any part of one’s life.
Afterimage by Alina Vergnano:
Time has gone weird lately. Or at least, something has changed in the way I perceive its passage. Its velocity goes in waves: days go fast, and faster, and then suddenly they slow down, as if the hours were on the verge of stopping, only to start racing again. When I think about this elastic movement, my mind keeps returning to Henni Alftan and her series of diptychs, Déjà vu, and in particular to one: Haircut (Déjà vu).
Henni Alftan, Haircut (Déjà-vu), 2020, oil on canvas; 2 parts, Courtesy KARMA, New York.
What draws my mind, and eyes, to this image, is its simultaneous depiction of time passing and time standing still. When I look at those scissors with a straight cascade of chestnut hair in between the shiny blades, I feel the stillness evoked by the precise brushstrokes, but also a soft pull to the moment coming next. It is not the tug of a far-removed future, but still, it is future. These two canvases bring me back to a haunting childhood question: what do we miss when our eyes blink? In my mind, the void left between the two images is filled by a sound, a snip. Something has unequivocally occurred; it is something subtle, yet radical. The scissors have closed and the hair has fallen, even if we missed the moment when it happened.
In my own work, time and change are central and, when I paint or draw, my main preoccupation is how to preserve their flowing nature. Things tend to happen fast and fluidly in my studio, and I normally respond more to images that are somehow similar to mine in nature. But the eerie, quasi-stillness in Alftan’s work is magnetic to me. It is like watching a very very thin still, distilling our days. It is disturbing, but I can’t stop looking.
Anne Imhof, Untitled (Wave), 2021.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
One image still on my mind from last year – one remaining among a surprisingly high number of exhibitions held during another year of the pandemic – is from the 2021 video Untitled (Wave) by Anne Imhof. It was exhibited in the cellar of Palais de Tokyo during Imhof’s grand exhibition Natures Mortes, part of the annual Carte Blanche programme. The exhibition was scheduled to open in March 2020 but was postponed due to the various lockdowns.
Anne Imhof, Untitled (Wave), 2021.
The film depicts the artist’s collaborator Eliza Douglas on a beach, dressed only in a pair of trousers, whip in hand, contemplating the waves rolling in, sometimes lashing out at them. Her hair is loose, her body is free. Having walked through Imhof’s halls of mirrors and studied her works, as well as those of other invited artists, this one stood out. Who wouldn’t like to beat the waves at this point? The woman’s repetitive whipping movements seemed cathartic. It made me think about how the pandemic can be used as a reset. Enough is enough.
I thought about the video again when I read Anne Berest’s editorial in the French magazine Madame, the supplement of Le Figaro, about how she writes all the time, working whenever there is a window. She calls this the luxury of freedom, and reflects on how it sets a good example for her daughters, showing them the joy of working and having a larger project in life. I’ve been thinking a lot about this. It’s taken me years to learn to devote myself to my work, to learn how to say no without feeling I need to give a lot of excuses and explanations. Reading the text made me think of Douglas whipping the waves. She has this freedom. Berest has it. I want it too.