TORBJØRN RØDLAND & KRISTIAN SKYLSTAD

Torbjørn Rødland, Meganekko Moe, 2003-14, from Sasquatch Century at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter.

Kristian Skylstad Is your production affected by your biography?

Torbjørn Rødland I believe art will always be affected by biography, not just for me but for everyone. Most artists tend to focus on other aspects, though. A photographer finds and places the camera in front of something, or something in front of the camera – a person, a site, an object. Sometimes I photograph objects I’ve travelled with for a while – it might be a leather strap from Tokyo or some stockings from Beijing. Even when certain elements aren’t from the place where the photograph is made, the local always bleeds into the picture somehow. If you compare my work to a photographic project based on the standards of reportage, the bleeding I’m dealing with is limited. My job is to externalise internal images, which are both personal and cultural. I’m actually keen on finding ways to deal with personal factors in art, especially since this was largely avoided by the previous generation of artists.

KS Unlike that of my generation, where the personal is inflated.

TR At the time when I defined my project, no one was talking positively about biography. If you know Jeff Wall’s story, you’ll find that the background for some of his pictures is almost soap opera-like, but he’s not comfortable sharing that, probably for good reason. The biographical reading has a tendency to overshadow other motivations. Most people still expect art to be a processing of personal experience, even though for a long time now postmodern artists have aspired to a role as social critics of a culture not centred around a specific individual. I accept that my pictures operate on different levels that are both interesting and irritating, depending on where you stand. These different levels are integrated or in balance.

KS The photographic, art and poetry – in contradiction to other forms of culture that point at something specific – tend to look for an eternal understanding, but that also means an eternal misunderstanding. Gauguin once said that the art was inside his head and nowhere else. Is your work a manifestation of your fantasies? You work with ideas, but your work isn’t conceptual.

TR An idea in itself has no value. The image is both result and starting point – it starts with an image that I don’t know how to deal with or to explain, and in the process of creating my version, I try to figure out why exactly it’s worth paying attention to. Creating the individual image is one thing, but how it fits into a format and inside a bigger group of pictures is essential. This process ends with an exhibition or a book, or both.

Torbjørn Rødland, Summer Scene, 2014, Courtesy of STANDARD (OSLO)

KS Which format has most importance? Do you compare their value? The book is eternal but the exhibition is fleeting.

TR When I was a student, the book was my main interest. Then I got pictures published in different contexts, and it always left me discontented. Mistakes were made, photographs were cropped and mislabelled – they didn’t look good most of the time. This made me gradually appreciate the exhibition, because there I was able to control the result. A dialogue in a room is very different from a book. They’re both interesting, but different. I started exhibiting internationally twenty years ago, ten years before I put my first real book together. I learned about how to exhibit photographs. The book format came in later and redefined the production. The images in I Want To Live Innocent from 2008 were created with a publication in mind. The book was the main framework and first context. Later, I would make exhibitions from more pointed selections. This was also the method for Vanilla Partner from 2012.

The book allows a broad production with many genres and image types coexisting. An exhibition holds a different tension, because you can see many more images at the same time. Some pictures that function in a book don’t work on a wall. You can compare it to playing live for many years as a musician, and then releasing an album. The benefit of the album is that it can be discovered and experienced whenever and wherever, while a concert has a very limited duration and extent.

KS Is your process intuitive or carefully planned?

TR What can potentially happen in front of and inside a camera is miraculous. I go for the photographic negative, which can’t be planned in detail. If I don’t succeed in creating a picture on my first attempt, making a new one is almost impossible. This has happened very rarely and only with pure still-life or object photographs. I believe I share this process with everyone who works intuitively: you have an inner picture of what can potentially be and this conception is essential for you to push the material or the situation beyond what’s ordinary and towards something indispensable. To get there you have to be open to what might potentially happen. I realise that the image I actually make is much more valuable than the one I planned to make. The final photograph has more precision, more individuality. Much of the joy in my working process comes from discovering qualities and symbols and consistencies in a completed body of work. I aspire for this to happen. I relinquish control, and then I react to whatever occurs. I’m not alone in this method. I do believe that both painters and writers work like this.

Torbjørn Rødland, ACV09, 2009, Courtesy of STANDARD (OSLO)

KS In your gallery shows you’ve often chosen a more eccentric and absurd selection of images than the work you’ve shown in institutions, even though it still has the same connotations. I’m specifically interested in the Andy Capp Variations, which in my eyes is an aesthetic exception. Where were you going with that series?

TR In retrospect I think the Andy Capp Variations, maybe more than anything else I’ve done, demonstrates the need to work through and go beyond postmodern appropriations by integrating qualities from classical art photography. The flat and mediated cartoon character is appropriated from a bar mirror photographed and combined with intimate everyday objects observed with an interest in personal association and light, surface, texture. I see an almost desperate need to reconcile different levels in one picture. As a viewer, you can choose to focus on the poetry of the familiar or you can miss these qualities because you’re provoked by the stupid Andy character, but the elements are there and in balance with each other. It’s pretty much the same balance as in my early photographs of myself as a long-haired art student with a plastic bag in the forest.

KS In your multiple exposures you’re exploring something more pictorial.

TR The multiple exposures show many parallels with what I tried to achieve with the use of a mirror in the Andy Capp Variations, but here it’s the result of two separate exposures on one photographic negative. I don’t know if it’s more or less pictorial. You could also see the double exposures as more in line with modernist photography and its critique of pictorialism. To me, they complicate the pictorial space in ways that are different from the single-view photographs that dominate my catalogue. Multiple exposures became another way of creating a fantastical pictorial space with basic photographic methods. I could have controlled it much better in Photoshop, but this is about losing control. I’m interested in the complexity of a picture. Here the layers are readable through the basic physics of analogue photography.

KS There are many markers in your early work referring to specifically Norwegian themes: heavy metal in the forest or nudists. As a Norwegian artist I find this liberating.

TR Yes, especially when I made portraits of Erik Bye, Maria Bonnevie and Titten Tei. The Black Metal musicians are all pretty much my age. It was important to me to look at how my project overlapped with and differed from theirs. Later, my focus expanded to include elements from American and Japanese image culture. On a trip to Japan in 2002 I discovered that the marginalised cuteness that came out of my 1990s production was mainstream in Japan. This discovery sent me back to Tokyo to talk to people and try to understand what the hell I was doing. The advanced Japanese image culture is very different from the Western one, partly because it developed outside of humanism. My belief is that many of the changes in mass culture in the United States and Europe after the internet have followed Japanese pop-culture: the acceptance of extreme cuteness and explicit eroticism are two examples. Japan has also developed a more advanced discourse around passion and strong feelings for fictional characters, for boys and girls, that you only get to know through visual media.

KS These kinds of cultures are more or less taboo in Scandinavia.

TR In Scandinavia we have strong ideas about how things should be. These basically Christian morals were continued and further developed in Western humanism. In Japanese pictorial culture, human nature is understood quite differently.

Torbjørn Rødland, Dancer, 2009-2012, from Sasquatch Century at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter

KS Photography has never been as powerful and popular as now. How does this affect you?

TR The idea of a reality dominated by pictures I know intimately from postmodern theories of the offline era, but there seems to be less shame in clichés now. It’s no longer problematic to explore experiences emulating banal photographs or movies. Quite the opposite. I always wanted my work to be more than self-conscious variations on worn-out cultural forms. The first photographs I did made me attempt other ones, which led to a couple of movies, which again led to quite different pictures, followed by a few books that led to some multiple exposures. I never had to stop and redefine this ongoing process because of Flickr, Instagram or Facebook. Changes in my work run alongside the development of these new social platforms. Dialogues do occur, since I reach for purely photographic qualities and a human appeal. I observe and I participate in the increased sharing of photographic material, but my project started rolling before the internet was fast enough for photography.

KS You staged some photographs before the internet that have qualities that are now a kind of norm on social media.

TR Something similar happened to major chunks of the photographic art I got to know in my twenties; it’s to do with teen image production. Memes are pure expressions of postmodern pluralism; the truth is not out there, memes say. Various contexts and surfaces reflect and distort each other, to everyone’s amusement. To me, this was a starting point. I tried to move on by no longer rejecting an inner life of emotions and contemplation, and by seeking contact with the juiciness of the real. On the internet you’ll find a lot of naïve photographs, a lot of cynical photographs, a lot of humorous visuals, but you’re not overwhelmed by this type of integrating project aspiring to be more inclusive than pluralism.

KS Do you deal with photography and art in the same way?

TR I see no reason for a division between the two. I process other forms of expression in the same way as photography. I have little sympathy for magazines and internet sites with separate sections for art and photography. If a sculptor hires a professional photographer to make a picture for him then it’s art, but if an artist manages the whole process herself, it’s photography. That’s what’s happening, and the medium of photography tends to gravitate towards contexts where luxury goods are promoted, especially in magazines. I call it a problem but the closeness to popular visual communication is also what makes art-as-photography so exciting and often so difficult to judge. Reading a photograph is now a very complex thing. This annoys a substantial number of people. Projects that stay within the overfamiliar zone of conceptual art are safe. Pure appropriation – to move a magazine page into the gallery space in order to study its form, its ethics and aesthetics – is a protected exercise. But this “critique” doesn’t challenge anyone anymore. Everyone is familiar with basic postmodern strategies. We understand an artist using photography. It’s more complicated to come to terms with the complexity in a photographer’s approach to a breathing world of beauty, life and consumption.

It’s sad that the art world didn’t learn more about photography in the short period when it dominated the scene. I see now how unable people are to evaluate the quality of a photograph. You could say that I advocate a rich photographic image that very often needs the context of art to stand out in a landscape of simplifying commercial structures. We just don’t seem to have a language for the kind of image that transcends these biased devices.

KS Do you have a language for it?

TR Well, we’re trying to create a language, to explain what happened and how we got here – not by rejecting conceptual art but by transcending it. If we want to redefine pictorialism, it can’t be pre-conceptual; it has to be trans-conceptual. We need more ambivalent categories, or categories that contain ambivalence.

KS You believe that it’s valid to channel these ideas through photography?

TR This isn’t something that I channel through photography. This is something photography channels through me.

KS I’ve never heard that one before. It reminds me of something Roberto Bolaño could or should have said about poetry.

TR I’m not sitting here with fancy ideas that I seek to spread using photography. I try to understand what I’m actually doing with this medium and why I return to certain kinds of pictures. I try to understand why and how they’re meaningful.

KS What’s the next step?

TR Oh, I just continue photographing. It’s a way to accept the passing of time – to realise I’ve made something I’m satisfied with. Often, when I see something that could become a picture I realise that a photograph I’ve already made is stronger than the one I could do there. Then I don’t have to pick up a big camera. In other words, I can imagine the project coming to an end. Maybe at some point there will be nothing left for me to do.

KS Have you ever considered quitting?

TR No.

KS You depend on it?

TR I’ve never thought of it like that. But I have nothing stronger or more meaningful, which may be a bit sad. Observer types often become photographers because they’re not so good at participating. Photography has fascinatingly enough become an entrance point for participation. If your photographic practice is oriented towards reportage you’ll end up searching and waiting for stuff to happen in front of the camera, but my approach is more active. I initiate a world that’s meaningful to me, as a picture but also as a place to live.

Torbjørn Rødland, The Measure, 2010

This text was first published in Objektiv #10.

SUSANNE WINTERLING & SARA R. YAZDANI

A conversation between Sara R.Yazdani and Susanne M.Winterling 

Susanne M Winterling, Solidarity, 2014. Installation, courtesy the artist

Sara R. Yazdani  In 2011, Rom for Kunst organised an exhibition of Tom Sandberg’s large-format photographs, hung over the entrance of Oslo Central Station. Black- and-white images denote an entire era of modern analogue photography, both its poetic and its documentary aesthetics. I remember one image from this public project in particular: the child bending and placing her head on the ground. It is present yet remote at the same time. 

Susanne M. Winterling What struck me was the classical physicality of these images and also the way that they are very ephemeral. But another reason to use Sandberg’s work as a starting point for our conversation is how in that setting, in the middle of life, they take on a near animated quality. The train station is such a time place and seemed such a strong materialisation of the moments captured in Sandberg’s images. This time in this space matters in a station, so one can get very close to the singularity of those moments. When we look at the images, we zoom in and pause them against this background of the busy station. We’re aware of the medium, the large photograph, because it’s immersed in this context, yet stands out in its singularity. 

SY  Sandberg’s legacy is profound. The medium of photography has, however, radically changed since he made these works. Media technologies change, art and human perception always develop alongside such changes. 

Tom Sandberg, Untitled, 1996

SW  Exactly, and another time thing: today, to use black and white photography is to emphasise its materiality; for example, used directly on the wall and blown up large scale it emphasises the reality of how we see images on an HD display. The acceleration of ways of perceiving, the constant scrolling, disposing and consuming of images on screens, not only contrasts with the sentiments conveyed by large- scale black-and-white photos, but also the use of material as content. This recalls the writer and feminist theorist Karen Barad, who, drawing from quantum physics and feminist theory, takes a different approach to the nature of matter that can fundamentally shake our understanding of the line between nature and culture. 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Outer Ear, unframed inkjet print, 200 x 135 cm, 2012, courtesy Maureen Paley.

SY  It also reminds me of Wolfgang Tillmans’ words in an interview with Beatriz Ruf, published in his artist’s book Neue Welt (2010): Everything is matter continually renewing itself and transforming from one aggregate state into another. His words emphasise that everything on the planet is matter – humans, plants and technologies – and that these matters are constantly transforming and changing one another. This hypothesis seems to linger throughout Tillmans’ body of work and invites an exploration of the vitality and formation of life and technologies. Meanwhile, it emphasises tendencies in contemporary art where visual images are assemblages. What if, for once, we did not see images as representations or semantic bearers? What if we started with materiality, media and technologies – the materiality of human bodies, nature, objects and machines – in our understanding of contemporary images? 

SW  The physicality of an image in Tillmans’ photos is often connected to a closeness and intimacy in the tradition of 1990s photography, and talks about the human body and desire. Other images that were really vivid for me when I was invited to his London studio as a young artist are all the still lifes he made, mini stages with light, fruits and food as well as remnants of certain night activities. On top of their intimacy and traces of a social community, there is a life, a kind of animation. For a lot of artists of my generation working with the camera, his work has been a strong influence. 

SY In What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, W.J.T. Mitchell radically underlines the fact that pictures are assemblages of images, objects and media. Whereas image refers to the figure or motif that appears in a medium, ‘object’ refers to the ‘material support in or on which an image appears, or the material thing that an image refers to or brings into view’.  The third component of the assemblage, ‘media’, refers to the ‘set of material practices that brings an image together with an object to produce a picture’. Pictures, as he notes, are ‘understood as complex assemblages of virtual, material, and symbolic elements’. This complexity arguably lingers throughout new media art. Pictures, photographs or images can no longer be interpreted as pure symbolic representations or mirrors of the world. They’re embodied systems, operating in and through larger technical, political, economical and societal systems and not only surfaces signifying language. As Mitchell stresses, pictures have ‘lives and loves’. We thus need to move beyond the idea of images as world mirrors. Or do we? 

SW  They live and love, and include other sensual aspects not only relying on language. The idea of the mirror seems more interesting as a screen. And nearly all the screens we face are reflective like a mirror. The screen has a life of its own. The shiny surfaces and screens that conquer so much of our immediate surroundings in daily life are often more like dark holes, like a Pandora’s box. 

SY  In philosophy, feminism and art, the theoretical debates are more and more concerned with materialism. These discussions are ontological as well as epistemological and are interested in non-human forces, human perception, matter and objects as meaning-makers. As the professor and writer Jane Bennett has asked: ‘Why advocate the vitality of matter?’ Her answer is fruitful: ‘Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies.’  These nonhuman powers thus need to be taken into consideration.They affect how we feel, taste and experience the world. And they most certainly circulate within new-media art. Here, material isn’t a physical object, a thin piece of paper, a medium, a photograph, or a colour; it’s the substance of material relations. In short, it’s a sphere, surface or mechanism where social relations are manifested. This mechanism, or mechanisms, seems crucial when entering the world of pictures, not only contemporary ones, but also earlier works. Sandberg’s large photographs unambiguously do that. 

But what is the social life of photography? What is a social surface? And how to they interrelate with one another? As the social is always a process occurring between humans and technologies, the distinction is possibly non-existent. These new social realities manifest themselves in our aesthetic relations with technologies and materials. These works are rendering new forms of subjectivity and have the ability to construct and question not only the materiality of the art, but also the existence of life and bodies. 

Susanne M. Winterling.

Your work My Physicality (2014) emphasises these forms of life explicitly. Human perception becomes key. It’s where the viewing subject enters the agency of the work, and where the work enters the subject.This agency is thus always social, always alive and operates in and through human and non-human objects. In your work, it appears that these social processes take place on the surface. Surface is here not superficial, empty or flat; it refers to the agency of media and technologies. For new media tech- nologies generate new forms of materiality. And it’s inside and through them that materials are transformed and embodied. The bodily dimension becomes central. Skin, tactility and surface are also emphasised in A Skin Too Thin (Light to Pink, No. 1) (2012). Skin is replaced with photo paper, colour, light and signals. Are the materials replaced by skin? It appears they meet somewhere halfway. 

SW  Skin colour: film and photography have always struggled to capture it. Also, it’s still a crucial element in the way lenses and recording devices are developed. Skin colour is a very peculiar phenomenon and thus tricky to work with in any medium. From the inside to the outside, it’s how we relate to the world in the first and most immediate sense. We’re covered with clothes, of course, but that’s also why conductive fabrics will become interesting tools and materials. With conductive fabric or paint we connect to interfaces; one might even claim we can become interface. The first materialisation of this in my work is photographic paper and the way it absorbs and gets absorbed and changed in the exposure process. That process is interesting to me on one side because it’s never the same and constantly moves and stays alive, always a singularity, but very visually ephemeral and super-sensitive. Its physicality is expressed in different shades of blue or pinkless than we find in biology, but definitely similar or comparable to biodiversity. 

SY You’ve preferred to use the term ‘physicality’: physicality of the image; physicality of the material; physicality of the body. What does that mean to you? When and where does physicality happen in photography, and objects of art in general? The term reminds me of Barad, whom I know has been an inspiration to you. 

SW Matter and materiality denote a wider range than ‘physicality’. I insist on what can be extracted from historical materialism, or other materialist specifications – as a political fact as well as an aesthetic one. In my work I often refer to film and film history as a material, just as the donkey in Robert Bresson’s film Au Hasard Balthazar (1996) is already an animal with a history. But to speak about the ‘physicality’ of an image is more to describe and investigate its qualities sensually: how is this happening? How is it talking? The past as well as the future influence us – for example, our perception of a piece of photo paper in an exhibition that has been developing since the opening and is constantly, according to the rhythm of the space and its architecture, exposed to light. 

Barad would say: ‘the larger apparatus in its particular material configuration enacts particular cuts that materialize determinately bounded and propertied ‘things’ together with their ‘agencies of observation’. A movement, a touch might evolve from light; light might also be matter. As an artist, the entanglement of this is very sexy and it allows for a super complexity even if it’s a very simple effect. We can be touched in many ways. 

SY  There’s an aesthetic interrelation between the material support of the work and its tactility. New materialism is also about how media and technologies process, transform and transmit information. It permits one to explore material that isn’t necessarily seen, directly ‘felt’ or visible. Hence, the digital. For how can one touch, see or feel digital codes, information and signals? Does its invisibility and lack of matter mean that it has vitality? These concerns recall the idea that electronic signals al- ways are embodied. 

SW  Electronic signals and all embodied waves also refer to the fact that all perceiving is embodied. This is one reason why I like working with 3D animation: you can feel the body being carved into space. Like marble as a material, the grid and wireframe structure allows one to play with touch and the possibility of closeness in a physical way. Surfaces like skin become crucial for osmosis; that’s where waves permeate. Like the nature/culture divide, I think the digital/analogue divide has to be changed and redrawn or even dropped. 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Central Nervous System, inkjet print on paper mounted on aluminium in artist’s frame, frame: 97 x 82 cm, 2013, courtesy Maureen Paley.

SY  What has influenced my questions in this regard is Tillmans’ exhibition Central Nervous System at Maureen Paley’s gallery in 2013. The subjects are in one sense becoming what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari referred to as a ‘body without organs’. Meanwhile, via the technological possibilities of both the digital camera and the inkjet print, the surface of the bodies in the images has become beyond or ‘larger’ than human biological skin. It touches you, and itself, almost like it’s living its own life, beyond the biological. It has become post-human. The touch is very mechanical, yet very poetic. In the gallery space the images become surfaces that create an intimate space where human perception and the body become essential. 

One could therefore argue that the materiality of these pictorial surfaces constructs new social realities. According to Barad, matter and meaning can’t be alienated. And science can’t be ignored here. This was explicit in your latest show Drift at Gallery Parrotta, Stuttgart, earlier this year, where hands, touch, immersion and technology drift through the gallery space. As Barad notes, ‘Touch is the primary concern of physics.’ This relates to the senses, how humans as well as particles sense and experience one another. As material forces, art objects also drift in social life and subjectivity. Reality and being become phenomena on the surface and its materialization of ourselves, as in Tillmans’ Central Nervous System and Sandberg’s enlarged pictures in Oslo. Here, photography is a medium whose agency empowers its meaning, movement and vitality. It’s an object that can reinforce and generate events and causality. But to what extent? 

ALEX KLEIN & MILENA HØGSBERG

When Milena Hoegsberg, acting chief curator at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter just outside Oslo, read the book Words Without Pictures (LACMA 2009 / Aperture 2010) she began to ask many questions about a subject that, in her own words, is not her area of expertise. The book, edited by Alex Klein, was conceived in collaboration with curator Charlotte Cotton to create a thoughtful discourse around current issues in photography. Every month for a year, an artist, educator, critic, art historian, or curator was invited to contribute a short, unillustrated, opinionated essay about an emerging or changing aspect of photography. These essays are accompanied by online responses by other photographers, curators and writers as well as transcriptions of live debates.

Stills from The Forgotten Space, Allan Sekula, 2010

Milena Hoegsberg Words Without Pictures offers a language to address not just photography itself, but the crisis it might be in. I think this also extends to the lack of a critical framework to determine its aesthetic value under the rubric of visual art. The book has no illustrations – a strategy that both offered a welcome space for inner visualisation and occasionally had me refreshing my mem­ory through Google searches on my phone. I was really struck by the intertextual approach, the way the included texts refer not just to each other, but also to a rich historical discourse on photography. I’m curious about what led up to this publication and to the choice of title.

Alex Klein I’m glad you responded to the format of the book. That was a very specific and considered decision that was made between myself, Charlotte Cotton and our designer David Reinfurt. Despite its seeming simplicity, and the role of the online component of the project, the objectness of the book was incredibly important to us. We wanted to strip away a pre- conceived photographic language going into the project because we were dealing with so many different types of photography and wanted readers to draw their own conclusions.

The temporal dimension was also key. There’s a running header with the date at the top of each page that always grounds you in time. This is because the project is, in its simplest sense, a document of one year of conversations about photography that happened in person, in public forums, online and through correspondence. It’s no coincidence that the design also resonated with the stripped-down aesthetic of information often associated with classic conceptualism.

The project initially developed out of a website that Cotton was working on called Tip of the Tongue and a one- week symposium and series of events called Around Photo­ graphy that I’d co-organised at the Hammer Museum with the artist James Welling. When we began the project in 2007 there was a feeling of urgency around the shifts in technology in both publishing and photography (believe it or not, it was still a moment when artists had a foot grounded equally in the analogue and the digital) and issues such as the resurgence of abstraction. Because we were based in Los Angeles and running the project out of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) it was deeply rooted in and pivoted around the conversations happening in the local community, which at the time were really exciting and contentious. My core concern, and I think one of my main contributions to Words Without Pictures, was to put different camps who don’t normally communicate in conversation with each other, such as art historians, photographers, ‘artists who use photography’, students, critics, enthusiasts, established artists, emerging artists, etc. I was keen to cross some wires and point to the multiplicity of what are seemingly simple prompts. Ultimately, we weren’t out to answer questions; it was more important to start the conversation and keep it open for continued discussion, which is why I think people still use the book in the classroom.

MH I particularly like your comment that one of the book’s aims was to connect different people in the ‘photo world’ and get them all into the conversation. It seems to me that there’s still a gap between visual artists and people who define themselves as ‘photographers’. Especially now, in the age of image overflow, with sites like Instagram and a proliferation of good amateur photo­graphers making well­composed images – where everyone has a stake in ‘creativity’ – it seems important to insist on the rubric of ‘artist’ and be able to distinguish those who have a legitimate artistic project/practice from the rest.

AK It certainly does, but I don’t get quite as worked up about it anymore. Part of the impetus to start the conversa- tions in Around Photography and Words Without Pictures stemmed from my own formative experience as an undergraduate working between the divide of the darkroom and the classroom. It was clear that the photographers privileged one history while the art historians, even when teaching a History of Photography course, were interested in another trajectory all together – it was very instructive for me to toggle between the two. That said, I think that gap is decreasing. It’s true that there is still a photo photo world, but I think there are more photographers working in the art world who navigate and draw from both histories. This has produced a lot of interesting work, but it also enacts a kind of erasure for the next gene- ration, which is something I articulate in my essay in the book. What happens when these histories become so intermingled, just because they look similar on the surface, that the individual stakes and questions that they proposed are muted? I’m fascinated by these kinds of misreadings and I think they can be productive, and also a little upsetting. It’s great that artists / photographers–whatever you’d like to call them–don’t have to walk around with such a big chip on their shoulder anymore, but I also think it’s important to under- stand the lineages of the medium you choose to work with.

As for the ubiquity of photographic images on social media and the web, I’m not really bothered by all of this because it’s always been a part of the medium. Photography has always been in the hands of scientists, explorers, politicians, the media, and especially amateur enthusiasts. In fact, I would argue that it’s precisely the multiplicity and varied uses of photography that make it so compelling. I’m addicted to Instagram, but I’d never mistake it for my studio work.

MH Although the publication is now five years old, many of the ideas feel current. At the same time, the years since have been so characterised by economic down­ turn and political unrest internationally that it seems like more should have changed. What would you add, given the task of writing a postscript or a revised edition today?

AK Because our project spanned 2007–08, the economic and political climate was very present for us. There was a sense of urgency that resulted from the US housing collapse, the presidential race and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Although I think these issues manifest themselves most clearly in the debates around abstraction, if I had it to do over again I’d try and open the discussion up to even more participants and connect it with a more global conversation. The book was structured in such a way as to encourage respondents to pull out different threads of inquiry and I think it would be inter- esting to see how people would take on some of the same questions from our current perspective. I’m sure the answers would be totally different.

That said, if I have one big regret it’s that the artist Allan Sekula’s involvement in the project isn’t particularly present in the final publication. Originally we met with Sekula and his students from CalArts to discuss facilitating a series of conversations with international artists, but our process was so fast-paced and our resources were so limited that it never materialised. Instead, I invited him and the artist Walid Raad to participate in a conversation that pointed to all kinds of questions about documentary, narrative, war and education. This was a key part of the project and it pains me that we couldn’t include it in the end, especially in light of Sekula’s recent passing.

MH It struck me when I screened Sekula’s film The Forgotten Space (2010) at the Art Academy in Oslo last autumn, how much his films refer to still photo­graphy, and how he uses this to generate a rhythmic narrative that allows his films to enter the discourse of global labour and economics. There’s a richness to how he contributes to the dynamic field between the still and the moving image. I was really fascinated by his work Fish Story (1989–95), which I’ve seen at Tate Britain. It really utilises the temporality inherent in the slide projec­tion, where the timing allows you to settle into each image, and to make connections between the stories. The work was accompanied by an eloquent wall text epilogue (for Mike Davis). To me, it was important that it was Sekula’s own words that framed the work and not the museum’s.

In the  collection exhibition at Tate Modern, his work Waiting for Tear Gas (white globe to black) was installed, again with his own text, advocating an on ­the­ ground, ‘no mask’, anti­journalistic approach. It was so poignant that you almost didn’t need the pictures. It really resonated with your project and the decision not to include images, to allow the discourse to emerge more clearly.

AK Absolutely. Captioning and contextualisation are always a big question within photography. Language always contaminates your interpretation of an image and vice versa. In the book, we were wary of images distracting us from the discussions at hand. There are multiple ‘photographies’.

MH I do, however, question the impact of Sekula’s more recent series of documentary photographs of workers, which somehow have never really resonated with me in the same way. I could extend this to a general disenchantment with representational work, but I think particularly when dealing with the issue of labour and the economic structures that underpin it, abstraction or per­formativity seem to generate a more productive field of interpretation.

AK One thing I often think about is how complicated it is for an artist who makes a significant contribution to art critical discourse, it puts an enormous amount of pressure on their own work. There is often an unfair expectation that the artwork is there to fulfill the promise of the writing. In any case, I’m right there with you when it comes to the representation of the body of the worker - not necessarily in Sekula specifically, but in contemporary art in general - as a kind of stand-in for leftist politics. We’re all still in shock that Allan is gone, so it’s hard to process it. As you say, I don’t think there’s any denying his importance as a critic, pedagogue, or his prescient bodies of work that traced the flow of global capital and information, such as Fish Story and Dear Bill Gates, or even the formal qualities of a 1970s installation like Aerospace Folktales. Which is all to say that the abstraction of finance doesn’t always have to be nonrepresentational. I’m cer- tainly not advocating a purely documentary mode, but in some instances I think that the proliferation of formal abstract photography that we saw a few years ago was as much a result of imaging the collapse, as it was a blatant capitalisation that was at times both critical of and complicit with the market. At its most extreme it risked a certain cynicism about the state of photography as a medium.

MH Returning to your earlier comment, I think you’re pointing to an important gap between theory and practice, between intention and output, something we all have to be constantly mindful of. As for the candid images in Waiting for Tear Gas, I found the images from the middle of the protest somehow less important than the text that Sekula generated. However, I also understand that this may well be because I’m reading these images through the lens of the last couple of years’ protests and actions around the world, and how they’ve been documented. Smart­phone cameras and ubiquitous internet access have changed the stake for the kind of photography that Sekula advocates in his 1999–2000 project. Works that operate through either representation or abstraction but also through performativity – an awareness of the problems of representation – sometimes seem to be able to sidestep part of this issue. It’s a difficult issue to speak very precisely about, but I wonder if you could expand on these ideas?

AK Maybe it’s a third type of abstraction that resides in, or performs, the multiplicity inherent in contemporary image production. Perhaps we could refer to an artist such as Mark Leckey in this respect. But of course, Leckey isn’t a ‘photographer’. But then again I’m not convinced that we can define ‘photography’ so simply. Ten years ago, we understood ‘photography’ to be the product of a camera loaded with film that was printed in a darkroom, and increasingly we under- stand it to be the product of a camera with a digital chip that’s manipulated via a screen. When photography was invented, however, it was referred to as ‘sun-drawn images’: there was the direct imprint of the world or the object on a chemical- coated piece of paper. What I’m getting at is that these are all very different things and yet they’re all called ‘photography’. In photography’s rather short life (175 years or so), it’s gone through so many technological, economic and conceptual changes that I don’t think we can come to a consensus about what we all mean when we say ‘photography’. Personally I’m much more interested in an idea of photography than trying to defend or demarcate a particular territory for a medium that’s physically in constant flux. Perhaps these hybridised practices that we’re discussing are closer to what a contemporary under- standing of the photographic medium is. This is something I’m thinking a lot about now, because I’m working on a survey of the artist Barbara Kasten’s work. I was just listening to an interview she gave in 1982, where she voices her frustration at being categorised as a photographer when the sculptural part of her work is equally as important.

MH I only recently learned of Kasten’s ama­zing work, but I’m enthused by her dynamic compositions that have a performative quality and the complex meeting of sculpture and photography in her work. Tell me more about how you came to her work, and the exhibition you’re working on.

AK It’s actually related to Words Without Pictures in a way. I’d first encountered Kasten’s work in my photography education – she often comes up when you begin learning about colour and lighting – I was reminded of her work around 2007 with the resurgence of photographic abstraction. Some of the work being produced by younger artists around that time was similar to Kasten’s in terms of the questions she was raising about process and photographic representation, but she wasn’t being widely acknowledged. I felt her work was ahead of the curve in terms of straddling different media in tandem with her particular conceptual and formal ways of working. So basically, the more I got to know her, the more her story became increasingly complex and compelling. Her formation develops out of an unexpected intersection of Bauhaus arts pedagogy in the US, California Light + Space, and postmodern concepts relating to representation and architecture. She was older than the ‘Pictures Generation’ artists, so she ended up showing in a post-minimal context and then she got categorised as a ‘photographer’. I don’t think the market or institutions were able to accommodate her kind of hybridised practice at the time. Now I have an incredible opportunity to work with her directly here at the ICA [Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania] to present a survey of her work for the first time and highlight the strong resonance of her work for a younger generation of contemporary artists.

Although Kasten is primarily know for her Constructs of the 1980s – Polaroids and Cibachromes that depict brightly coloured sculptural installations staged for the camera and produced through elaborate lighting techniques – there’s so much rich work produced before and after. For example, she was operating in an ambitious directorial mode in the mid- 1980s with her Architectural Sites photographs, where she worked with a cinematic lighting crew to illuminate and photograph the latest postmodern buildings and sites of globalised capital and culture, whether museums or the World Financial Center. The exhibition will also feature some of her early fibre sculptures and luscious cyanotypes, as well as presenting her collaboration with dancers, her sculptural video work, and the new minimally abrasive photographs that she’s been making for the last seven years or so. Which is to just say that it’s important not only to show the multiple connections in her work through various media, but also to contextualise her as a contemporary figure. Here’s a woman in her late seventies with an incredible body of work behind her, but she’s still very active and the new work is really good.

MH There’s something very rewarding about an artist’s older work striking a chord in the present, and also to see someone who represents a practice that spans decades, in a time when commercial structures are obsessed with discovering new young talent. It sometimes seems as if we think that artists under thirty­five have a monopoly on the contemporary.

AK Contemporary art is so often hinged to a sense of the ‘new’, or at least the ‘right now’, which I think is partially a result of its attachment to the market. Some artwork needs time to come into its own and take on new resonances; perhaps it was ahead of the curve or so in sync with its moment that you couldn’t see it when it was made. In the case of Kasten, she’s still producing compelling and relevant work, which is made even more interesting by the decades of work that preceded it.

MH In Venice last year, I was struck by how much work seemed to be engaging the digital and how many video works had a very crisp sculptural composi­ tional language, referring to the photographic (Duncan Campbell, Camille Henrot etc). I find myself wanting to know more about sculpture and film that refers to photo­ graphy (Tamara Hendersen), or photography that positions itself as sculpture (Elad Lassry, and Corin Swoon in the Scottish Pavillion 2013) or in relation to performance (Corin Hewitt).

AK I’m hesitant to talk about stylistic trends, but I do think that there’s an ever-increasing interest in the multifaceted nature of image production and dissemination, which might have more to do with the impact of the web than with conventional photography. But then again, as I mentioned earlier, I’m not sure that all of these categories are so distinct right now. One thing all of the artists you mention have in common is that they enact a kind of multivalence of photographic meaning and question the agency of a kind of imaged authorship in different ways, whether through voiceovers, archives, found images or commercial practices.

MH As Getty has just made 10,000 images from its collection available online, to be shared, altered and disseminated, I’m curious whether you feel online platforms are productive for the discourse of photography today?

AK If there’s one thing I learned from Words Without Pictures, it’s that the web has its own distinctive temporality and discursive properties. Sometimes it helps to try and slow it down a bit, and sometimes you should just embrace its crazy associative potential. But I’m also a firm believer in print publications and in-person conversations. The web is just one tool for production and distribution. I think we’d be remiss to think otherwise.

MH One last question: you’re currently in­ volved in the Hillman Photography Initiative, a special project within the photography department of Carnegie Museum of Art. Can you tell me a bit more about this?

AK Although the Hillman Photography Initiative is in its nascent stages, so far it’s been really exciting. Right now it’s basically operating as a think tank that will bring together a rotating group of artists, curators, critics and scientists to develop a multifaceted project. We’ve been given a lot of free- dom to dream together and I’m excited about the direction it’s taking.

This conversation is from Objektiv #8. Images below are from the series Scene and the series Architectural Sites by Barbara Kasten. 

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

NAN GOLDIN & JH ENGSTRÖM

Nan Goldin and JH Engström in Landskrona, August 2014 Photo: Nina Strand

Interview by Nina Strand

During the photo festival in Landskrona last August, Nan Goldin was one of the four main exhibitors. She presented the version of her slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency that was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2007. The work, first published as a book in 1986, was revolutionary for its personal, intimate diaristic style. In Landskrona, she granted us an exclusive interview on the condition that her close friend, Swedish photographer JH Engström, could join us in the small, cosy restaurant in the basement of Hotel Öresund.

“My work is best either as a book or as a slide show. Photography has to be experienced physically, not online”, says Goldin. “Photography is the only art form that works in books”, she adds. She loves books, but originally wanted to make films. She says that the slideshow is the closest she comes to filmmaking. She has made one film installation, Sisters, Saints & Sibyls, a work about her sister’s suicide in 1965, shown at Rencontres d’Arles in 2009, but according to Goldin it’s not yet finished, and it’s uncertain whether it ever will be.

“Three hundred and fifty people fainted when they saw it”, she claims. “That’s the best accolade I could get. It made me feel good. I always want to make people laugh or cry. I could never dream of fainting!”

The two photographers hope that Rencontres’ new director Sam Stourdzé will be able to bring more magic to Arles.
“I still remember seeing Guy Bourdin there”, says Goldin. “He’s been a great influence.” “Really strange stuff”, Engström agrees.
“Really radical work. I saw his work when I started to look at photography.”

Goldin says she has always been fascinated by photography, but that it took her a while to realize that it could be viewed as art. She was overjoyed when, in an evening class, she was introduced to photographers like Diane Arbus and Larry Clark.

“Clark’s book Tulsa made a huge impression on me. I’ve never been interested in so-called ‘good’ photography, only 100% honesty.

Engström remembers the magic of taking his first photograph.
“My father had a box camera. I was four years old. We put the negative under a glass in the sun. It was absolutely magic. It’s magic now even. The Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi said this in her talk earlier today: that the most important process of photography is in the darkroom and that she longs for the darkroom-magic.”

Goldin agrees.

“I don’t like what the internet does to photography: you no longer see the images. The computer should only be used for sending mail and reading news”, she insists. “Computers and social media have ruined the world. And I feel I’ve lost my medium. I was recently at a party for Magnum, where I stated that photography is over – it’s dead, it’s just a video game. No one talked to me for the rest of the evening.”

Engström disagrees that Goldin has lost her medium.
“You spent two hours inside the book tents after your talk today. I don’t know anyone who’s so passionate when it comes to photography as you.”

They were destined to meet, she says of Engström. She has a strong relationship with Scandinavian photography.
“My favourite photographers are Swedish. I really believe in the heritage that came from Christer Strömholm, which his student Anders Petersen continued on and what Petersen’s student JH Engström is working with now. All three of them have a special sensitivity that they’re not afraid to show. When I first met Strömholm, he was happy to have met someone as egotistical as himself.”

They also share a true passion for photography.

“We both take images to stay alive”, Goldin says. “This is my reality. I’ve made a record of my life. Photography has really saved my soul.” Later she says, “My advice to young artists is that they shouldn’t do it if they don’t absolutely have to. If you don’t have to make art to stay alive, then do something else. It’s art – it’s not a job – it should be what you do to survive. When I was teaching, I wasn’t interested in tearing my students apart; I wanted to look for the positive in them. I wanted them to believe in themselves, and from that point they could do anything. I grew up before there was an art market, where you were an artist in a more spiritual way. Today, my students only talk about what gallery they want to exhibit in. I’m not sure if this is the way to go. Art must come from deep inside yourself, and how you look at the world around you. I tell my students never to read texts on postmodern theory – they should take LSD instead.

Engström praises Goldin’s teaching and inspirational skills.
“I remember once in Skåne, when we’d worked on one of my books all day. I was tired and made a joke, and you looked really angrily at me and said if it wasn’t important for me then we should just quit. I’ve never forgotten it. It’s important to stay focused.”
Goldin says she suffers from a ’Pygmalion complex’.
“I can help people see themselves, show them how beautiful they are. I’m famous for getting people out of the closet, and some have fallen in love with themselves through my photos of them.”

So photography may not be completely dead for Goldin, but she no longer believes in a singular photograph.
Engström agrees.
“Many photographs make one photograph.”

“I work in series, just like you”, Goldin says. “When I saw one of your first books, Trying to Dance, I was so happy. And I love the title, it’s very Scandinavian. I was thrilled that one can make such tremendously powerful work without creating the ‘good image’. I was raised to believe that a book should look a certain way, be printed in a certain manner, but you’ve found a different way. You’ve achieved a freedom from the conservative idea of what’s right. I’ve previously said, when looking through your book La Recidence, that when looking at your work, you have to learn a new photographic language.”

Goldin says that it was when working on her latest exhibition Scopophilia, commissioned by the Louvre, Paris, that “I lost my faith in the single photograph and started working with grids.” In 2010, for a period of eight months, she was allowed to wander around the museum every Tuesday with her camera. The exhibition featured details from various paintings, put together with pictures from her own archive.
“I fell in love with several of the paintings. There were some faces who brought back memories of people I once knew. My dear friend Peter Hujar explained to me what the word ‘scopophilia’ really means: ‘fulfilment of your whole self by looking’. It was fantastic to work at the Louvre. I could walk into a room and fall totally in love with a painting.”

Lo in camouflage, NYC, 1994, from the book Eden & After, 2014 Nan Goldin, Phaidon

Goldin has just published her first book in eleven years, Eden & After. She explains that the reason it has taken so long was a strict publishing deal, which she doesn’t want to talk about. Eden & After, is a collection of images that the childless photographer has taken of her friends’ children over a period of 35 years.

“My philosophy is that children come from another planet; they know everything when they’re born. I once heard a friend’s child – she was maybe four or five at the time – asking a baby: ‘Do you remember God? Because I’m beginning to forget.’ Children come so wise, and in the course of taking pictures I began to understand that they understand everything, and then people devote their lives to making them forget. This work isn’t so different from what I’ve done before. I’ve photographed artists and children my whole life. I photograph the wild ones, the ones who can’t be tamed.”

The book also deals with the relationship between parents and children, as well as the issue of gender. In some images, Goldin portrays a child who wanted to be a boy between the ages of six and fourteen.

“There are no images of kids crying in the book”, Engström remarks. “That’s not what I was focusing on”, Goldin says. “It’s the knowledge they’re born with, and that they are taught to lose.”

Goldin works constantly – obviously not on a computer. The floor of her studio in Brooklyn, New York, is scattered with prints, ready for editing. “I have assistants with aspirations of becoming archivists who go through all my photos for me. There are many images I’ve forgotten; it’s like a treasure hunt. I heard a rumour that Weegee had big bags full of negatives in his garage when he died, something that’s comforting for me to know if I don’t get through my own.”

She photographs whatever her gaze is drawn to, believing that photography is all about memories. Whether the images show people or buildings is irrelevant.
“Right now, I’m very into architecture. Maybe I’ll look closer into this. My latest work consists of landscape imagery. I had a visit from a friend in my studio who took a look at them and said they were landscape photos taken by a person from another planet.”

Goldin, who divides her time between apartments in Paris, Berlin and New York, was not keen on leaving New York this time. She’s worried about the growing anti-Semitism in Europe. During her artist talk, she also expressed her deep concern about the situation in Gaza and said that instead of listening to her, we should all be out on the streets demonstrating.

“It’s a massacre we’re witnessing. This situation is raising the anti-Semitism, and it’s very scary. I encourage all artists I know to make a cultural boycott of Israel. I’ve always been afraid of anti-Semitism, and always been pro-Palestine. I remember a book I saw when I was fifteen, with images of Palestinians in the camps. I’ll never forget it. Ever since, I’ve refused to have anything to do with Israel, despite repeated invitations. There are no grey tones in this conflict: the situation is completely black and white.”

“I came here because I love you”, she tells Engström. “All I do is about love. I never photograph anyone I don’t love. Or maybe The Ballad is made of both love and hate. Eden & After is more tender. I’m more tender.”

It is late. The restaurant has actually been closed for an hour but our waiter did not want to disturb us. Now he asks us kindly if we can possibly take our last drinks in the restaurant lobby. After Goldin has given him a huge tip, we go outside for some fresh air. Engström hands me his camera to photograph the two photographers. We’re all happy with the result. And in a way, we all took the image.

“It doesn’t matter who pushes the button”, Engström says.
And then Goldin is done. She has a new book she wants to read. “Every night I read for two or three hours. I’m from the not-googling generation. We can keep the book alive. I don’t need to explain myself further”, she concludes. “It’s all there in my photographs.” 

Ava twirling, 2007, from the book Eden & After, 2014 Nan Goldin, Phaidon

This interview is published in Objektiv #10.

FEDERICO CLAVARINO & BRIAN SHOLIS

All images are from the book Hereafter, 2019.

WHAT WE FORGET MAKES US WHO WE ARE

A conversation between Federico Clavarino and Brian Sholis.

Brian Sholis I’d like to begin with the shift in your work between the pictures you made in Ukraine, circa 2010, to those in Italia o Italia. I see it as a move toward obliqueness or suggestiveness and slightly away from a conventional, narrative “documentary” style.

Federico Clavarino My Ukraine work came out of a need to try out things I admired in other photo-graphers—artists that brought me into photography, like Robert Frank. I wanted to travel and work in a way that moved between documentary and something more personal or lyrical. My documentary intention, so to speak, was eventually something I found frustrating in the Ukraine work. I didn’t know the country, couldn’t communicate in its languages, didn’t have enough time. These limitations urged me toward something a bit more personal. When the time came to confront my own country and I began returning to Italy, I had to find the fragile balance between what the work can say and what remains more silent or ambiguous. I could hint at things and outline possible interpretations. I was confident about a few of the ideas I wanted to express, and more emerged as I worked. What drove it all was an urgent sense of having to confront where I came from after a few years of not having lived there. 

BJS What did leaving Italy and then returning reveal to you? Did that distance and perspective help?

FC Retrospectively, I’d probably say yes, it helped. I could notice things that are harder to see when you live in a culture. I was lucky, in a way. I was an insider who knew things tourists couldn’t know. The kind of things I couldn’t know when I went to the Ukraine. On the other hand, I had the privilege of the outsider. I could see both the shape and the texture of the place. When you live in an Italian city you’re proud of being surrounded by heritage and famous ruins— 

BJS Western civilization. 

FC Yes, exactly. You’ve been taught that should be celebrated. But it’s strangely similar to what Edward Said pointed out about Western understandings of Eastern cultures in Orientalism, that Westerners despised present Eastern societies while venerating their pasts. Many people look at countries like Italy, Spain, or even Portugal and Greece as the cradles of European civilization. And at the same time those societies can be deemed inferior compared to countries with different economic or political situations. 

BJS You’re making this work around the time of the most recent economic downturn and the beginning of the Eurozone crisis …

FC It’s part of the same crisis. Anyway, I feel that in Italy one has a clear and stereotypical image of the past, one that inspires pride: beautiful ruins, Renaissance paintings, bountiful landscapes. But what about the present? Or the future? The present feels frustrating and ridiculous and it’s difficult to imagine a bright future.

BJS These disconnects seem to me like struggles for power over a narrative.

FC I think that’s true. Are we able to find a strong enough narrative for what we believe in, and does that help us assess the past correctly? If not, narratives we dislike might gain the upper hand. In a bleak way, my work also engages with that. As an Italian citizen, making that book had a sense of urgency. It was about finding meaning and a balance between the personal, the historical, and the political. That’s one reason why many things are doubled in the book. There is the “official” image of the country, which can seem like a simulation laid atop reality. But I don’t want my gestures, and the book, to be seen as ironic—which leads again to the more lyrical and poetic elements. 

BJS You have described this book as your first mature work. Was there something about making sense of the past of the country you were raised in that gave you an opportunity to find, for lack of a better phrase, your photographic voice? Is there a connection between this subject matter and how you’ve learned to structure photographic narratives?

FC It is probably something I haven’t given enough thought to. On the other hand, my proximity to the subject matter, plus what I was going through as an immigrant, perhaps meant that I could be more effective. I had more emotional investment in that work than in anything I had done previously. On the other hand, in the beginning everything was very open-ended. I was just going back and walking around.

BJS In the beginning it wasn’t conceived as a project?

FC Not in the beginning; it was more a need. Things always start a little bit more like adventurthan projects. When you can give structure and purpose to what you feel as urgent or necessary, that’s when it becomes a project. One interesting thing about analogue photography is that it has a weird relationship with memory. It is retrospective: you only see things after some time. While you live things and shoot, you’re thinking. Then you develop the film, look at the photographs, and notice things you hadn’t previously seen. There are new connections between what you were thinking, what you saw, and what ended up in the photographs. The cycle then repeats, and each cycle is suffused with a little more intention. I am fascinated, in a long project, by the constant dialogue between research and practice. A lot of my ideas emerge from what appears in the film. The ideas get “developed” further by thinking and reading. 

BJS Let’s tease that out while discussing The Castle, your subsequent book, which includes writing. Can you talk a little bit about your interest in theoretical research, historical discourse, even fiction and poetry? How do those things create the feedback loops you describe? 

FC I spend a lot of time reading. The Castle is a direct reference to Kafka’s unfinished novel of the same name. Though the inspiration was not direct: I’d read The Castle years before, and the idea to work with it arrived perhaps halfway through the project. But even how I thought my pictures related to that book changed as I made progress. I was travelling around often for different reasons— 

BJS Around Europe?

FC Yeah. I would take a lot of notes; I write a lot. Some is text, some is notes toward specific images. At other times I see something that connects to something else I thought or read, so I’d draw it and then try to tease out those connections later. There are goose-bump moments of connection, that’s when you feel you’re on to something. It’s a loose, associative process, but one I approach with rigor. 

BJS On the subject of openness or looseness, can you talk about your preference for the photobook as a structure? Does it help you to give structure to what is otherwise a seemingly open, porous, and iterative process? 

FC I think Marshall McLuhan said, “The more the world tends to break apart, the more desperately we try to put it together.” If your work is composed of bits and pieces and fragments, then you need to weave them together very well. The connections between them must seem inevitable. As you surf that kind of openness there is a kind of paranoia behind it, about how it will come together. 

BJS In The Castle or more generally?

FC More generally. You’re not in full control, at least not until you have the intuition that it’s all  linked together. Then you have to work on those links to make them intelligible. The closed format of the book helps muster a certain degree of both complexity and closure. I like working with books because you can read them the first time with the feeling that something connects it all—that paranoia again. You know you can’t get all of it, so you go back and read again. That’s the ideal.

BJS Is the particular structure of The Castle, in which each chapter concludes with notes, a microcosm of what you’re describing? Is it meant to encourage the reader to reconsider the photographic sequences she’s presented with?

FC Yes, and at the same time it provides context: you read those images in the context of those words. Our cultures privilege text. So, if you play it smartly, a text can broaden or redirect the reader’s understanding of images. It makes possible other interpretations. I want to invite people to go on the same kind of adventure I went on. Start here and you’re prompted to go elsewhere. I like the feeling that The Castle is not complete. It’s controlled, it’s finished, it’s a book—but it’s not complete in itself. You can profit from reading it more than once. 

BJS Image and text create something like a parallax view that gives depth, a third dimension. 

FC Exactly, something like a third dimension. 

BJS Can you speak more about how The Castle uses different layouts, different pacing, in its chapters? 

FC That, too, was the result of a long process. I remember one weekend I went to a friend’s country house. I went to the garage and spent a few days mapping out images on the wall. I really needed to see them all together, so I could map the images onto panels. Which is a bit like that Mnemosyne Atlas way of working, where you try to find and map connections in two dimensions.

BJS You mentioned paranoia earlier. It’s like the investigator in a police procedural trying to chart the sequence of crimes to discover who committed them. 

FC Exactly! I love detective stories. I think the third season of True Detective has a lot to do with my work. There are many things you don’t know, you don’t notice. A crime scene can leave a lot unsaid. So, too, does photography. My projects are collections of evidence or fragments. I have to try to fill in some gaps—and encourage you to do the same. Only it’s not crime and murder, it’s history and ideas.

BJS I have never before made the connection between sequencing events to solve a crime and sequencing a photobook.

FC There are set ways to work with sequencing in a book, through spreads, or recurring elements, or narratives, or chapters. The interesting thing for me was trying to maintain that “third dimension” we were talking about. I think having different layouts helps. And the layering in the second chapter mimics those mosaics I worked on in the garage while editing. I kept making new discoveries, which helped to differentiate the chapters. I decided that the first chapter would work with super-imposition, in which one space is sandwiched onto the other. With the third chapter, I felt the need to have larger images, a different rhythm, a bit like techno music.

BJS It’s four-on-the-floor house music: every page has a big image. There is no respite. Let’s talk about Hereafter, your most recent project, and about switching from a 35-mm camera to a view camera. You’ve described your more recent formal evolution as being one in which the world gets cut into smaller and smaller pieces …

FC Hereafter was different because, first of all, it got really personal. Secondly, there was a specific story and there were other people involved. 

BJS Did that story come out of the found images?

FC The story is the family story, so it is in the archive and in the conversations I quote from.  Everything we’ve discussed about fragments and piecing together evidence confronted me when I encountered this archive—though it was really more of a mess. A chaotic mix of photographs, letters, clippings, drawings, and so on that I found in my grandmother’s place. Some of it I could make sense of, but a lot remains a mystery even to me. When talking with my grandmother and with others, some people remembered events others had forgotten. Some people remembered the same events differently. I was fascinated by the process of memory—how memory is made of forgetting. What we forget makes us who we are. Working with a view camera came from the fact that I needed to think the images a little bit more. I like the rituals the view camera invites: sitting down for a portrait, the long observation of an object in a still life. I enjoy setting up a tripod, waiting for the right light to come through a window, and how time and observation make some things disappear and other things appear. I had spent years running around and snapping away. So I sat down and talked and took notes and read letters.

BJS Perhaps this subject matter—patient family members, objects you own or have continual access to—allows you to pause in a way that your previous work, made on the move, could not. 

FC Yes. I couldn’t afford to spend much time in the places I had previously travelled. Also, in this work, the role of the text is different. There are moments in Hereafter in which the way texts and images work together is accomplished and I’m happy with that. 

BJS And is it those moments that you feel the story of your family opens out onto something broader, something universal?

FC Yes, but it is difficult to talk about without considering examples. In the beginning of the book my uncle Robin says that he doesn’t believe in death, that he has written something and that I will have to hear it. There is already an ambiguity: you’ve written something, why do I have to hear it? The related image is a door opening onto a room from which light streams out. There is this synaesthesia of hearing and looking and reading. The book has sound and voices, like a chorus. In another section, there is a portrait of a guy I met in Sudan, John. He had the same name as my grandfather. One day, while we were walking, I took a portrait of him. I wasn’t even sure I was going to use portraits in the book. It turned out he was squinting; it was like I was looking at him through the camera and he was looking back at me. I liked that in the context of a chapter in the book about the perception and representation of otherness. So, I decided to pair that portrait with a text, a report my grandfather wrote about a blue-eyed pickpocket in Sudan. This guy was convicted dozens of times because everybody recognized his blue eyes. At the end of the report, the pickpocket says, “all of this because of these accursed eyes of mine.” But, of course, he also uses his eyes to see—a complicated exchange is happening, all of which affects the portrait. 

BJS His eyes were his identifying mark—a scarlet letter. How the world takes him in and what he uses to take in the world.

FC Exactly. And to think of all of this in the context of race and colonial history became very interesting. Nothing in these two fragments—the portrait and the report—speaks about this openly. But bringing them together invites peoples to think about that. 

BJS Perhaps we can turn to work you admire that is not necessarily photographic. In the past you have cited WG Sebald and Chris Ware’s Building Stories. Both do a great job of balancing text and image in ways that are mutually reinforcing but also open them up.

FC The past and ghosts always appear in Sebald’s work. This is something I’m also obsessed with. But I also admire the way he uses pictures, that the photographs are not illustrations of what’s being said. In Chris Ware’s case, and in Building Stories in particular, I love that he creates a universe in which time is completely out of joint. You don’t know where to start reading. You can open the box and grab something at random, then piece the rest together depending on what you pick up next. I like that. I enjoy time travel when I can do it. We were talking about the book earlier. I would really like to try a project that does not end up as a book, that maybe allows for this kind  of time travel. I like the idea of being able to work with something that can be kept open and revisited continuously.

This conversation is from Objektiv #19. Objektiv is celebrating its tenth year in 2019, and this year's issues will look both backwards and forwards. For this issue, we've asked artists who have featured in our first eighteen issues to ‘pay it forward’, so to speak, and identify a younger artist working with photography or film whom they feel deserves a larger platform.

BASMA ALSHARIF & CHRISTINE REBET

Basma Alsharif, Comfortable in our New Homes, 2017

Drawing Connections

Tomorrow sees the screening of films by the artists Christine Rebet and Basma Alsharif at Caro Sposo in Paris. Basma Alsharif here in conversation with Christine Rebet on their work and how the collective is a way to affirm your position in the present. 

Basma Alsharif In my most recent piece, Comfortable in our New Homes, I use the concept of the “eternal return” as a way to bring together disparate landscapes and people. It’s as a way of fusing the Gaza Strip with other parts of the world and to ask questions about civilisation and humanity – though fairly indirectly.  This is something I do in a lot of my works (bringing disparate locations and ideas together), just as I think curiosity is a huge part of what drives my interests: wanting to find out how certain thing will work together, or not. With this piece, I had a political agenda, but I also very clearly knew that I wanted to move beyond my own subjective inquiries and desires. And yet I found that impossible: how does one separate oneself from the work one makes? I'm curious to know how you think about this in your work. 

Christine Rebet I believe there’s a personal take on any event. What triggers our thoughts could be both personal and political. The closer we are to a personal tale, the more collective it can become. When we start a work, I believe it’s important to delve into the subject deeply to find the backbone of what matters. I understood it in making the animation In the Soldier's Head. I delve into the very intimate and painful subject of the traumatised psyche of a soldier during the Algerian war. The film mines the collective terrain of a colonised landscape and mind. I’m French and I’ve questioned the past of my country. I come from a country that has colonised many other countries. It’s a reverse. 

BA What do you mean a reverse?

CR It’s going in reverse in the sense of observing colonisation from a different perspective. As a kid I grew up with political refugees and have developed sensitivities towards the history and origin of displacement.

BA Is it curiosity?

CR Curiosity, and I enjoy the exchange as well.

BA What made you this way ? 

CR It comes from my family: they taught me from a very young age to respect everybody. I never felt disconnected from kids who came from different parts of the world. 

BA You've spoken about you how you’re from a colonising country. In In the Soldier’s Head you talk about your father, a soldier in Algeria who then suffered from PTSD. You reveal that you bonded with his experience when you suffered hallucinations from malaria fever, ultimately leading you to make the work you did. Can you tell me a bit more about this?

Christine Rebet, In the Soldier’s Head, 2015

CR During the fever your body and psyche change, you almost shift into a third person. Similarly, when making an animation, your mind reaches another state. It’s deep. 

BA Because of the nature of animation being a slower process? 

CR Because it’s very repetitive and you have to commit to your subject and embrace the consequences for a long period of time. Although I’d been thinking about this work for a while, I was only predisposed to commit to it after contracting malaria. As I was hallucinating, I was somehow dispossessed from my mind and body. 

BA What do you make of having had this experience in a foreign place, and not in France? I’m curious to know whether or not you needed to be removed from home in order to have such an experience.

CR I’ve always felt removed from my own country, as if my mind is a foreign land. I’ve built a second language that has been hosting my imagination. 

BA I think I know what you mean. I’ve always felt like a stranger everywhere. It's a very deep feeling of knowing one doesn’t belong anywhere because one's identity is so closely connected with the culture of the place one grows up in. But the trick is that we’re all in a way foreign to the earth. These are human experiences that I imagine almost everyone has thought: why was I born to these people and why are these my siblings? Why was I born in this city or this country? How similar am I to other people here? But then, if we really think about it, we’re foreign to the earth and that somehow connects us all. It may sound simple or naive, but I was after something like this in my film: to connect different histories, landscapes, people – not to say "We are the world", but just "Here we are".

CR I totally agree with all of this. I believe there’s a multiplayer locus linking different places, histories and momentums together. It could be a trajectory connecting real locations with imagined spaces, real instances to fictitious ones, memory to its spectre. When I look at your work, that’s what I see. 

BA And yours removes time from space. We’re in a space where time is no longer a function. 

CR A space where time could be reassessed. 

BA You started with drawings and then you morphed them into animation for In The Soldier's Head, right?  How did this decision come about? Had you worked in animation before? 

CR I’d worked in animation for about ten years. When I draw I can choose whether it’s a singular narrative or a film. In the Soldier's Head appeared as I drew a cave entitled Shadows of Family Tree. The cave buried a secret. We never found the site of the hospital where my father was sent during the war. The military administration never revealed its location. From the drawing came an urgent desire to exhume the journey of my father' s troubled mind and an invitation to grieve for collectively colonised minds.

Christine Rebet, Shadows of Family Tree.

BA Do you feel as if this work speaks to a certain political environment in France today?

CR Yes, it was in response to today’s political environment that I started interrogating French society's denial of its colonial history. I’m interested in the fragile terrain of dispossession. I want to animate what’s uncomfortable, unnameable, unspoken, whether it’s trauma, violence, colonisation or domination. 

BA Do you question that in your work?

CR In my own and through others. When I joined the Columbia MFA I wanted to extend film further into the subconscious of collective agency through live action, performativity and social sculpture. In an echo of the Arab Spring uprising, I constructed The Square, a film/monument enacting the movements of civil union and revolt found in public squares. It’s a reinvented narrative of existing locations. For example, the lost and violent territory of In the Soldier’s Head is reinvented from my father's biography. This location exists, yet its real geographical placement is unknown.

BA We can only understand where we are, based on our understanding of being the most important beings on the planet. We can only understand the earth in relation to ourselves. Even if we say that there’s a vast, empty landscape that exists where there are no humans, it’s still a human conception. And archaeology, the unearthing of this history, is an affirmation of our own importance: to say “We did this.” When people speak like this – we built churches, and we made pots or jewelery – you think, “We didn’t do that. That was some other person in another space and time.” A person of whom we have no true conception, and it’s all in our imagination. It seems to serve an affirmative purpose and is a desperate grasping at our own importance. And actually I think that in In the Soldiers Head you’re using our connection to each other through trauma. 

CR I think the connection I have in the film is in the form of trauma, fantasy, hallucination, dream and spectres. In early works, I borrowed those forms from the optical illusions of the pre-cinematic landscape. In the Soldier's Head  is conceived as a deceptive apparatus to parody the hypocritical and violent machinery of the imperialist agenda. The trauma is channelled through the constant rapture and disruption of hallucinations and mirages. It’s already a projection. It’s both embedded in the earth and magnified as a projection, horizontal and vertical. 

BA We’re much more comfortable knowing that another civilisation or nation could destroy us than thinking that we could be wiped out in the blink of an eye by a natural disaster. Palestinians were a people before the occupation, but as far as the modern construction of "identity" is concerned, our identity is wrapped up in being oppressed by Israel. And that’s a terrible thing, but the real terror is knowing that something without logic could wipe us out and we wouldn't be given a chance to write history books to explain why we ended up where we are.  

CR The Middle East has been subject to so much destruction, war and pillage. For so many years, civilisations have built resistant traditions to survive erasure, disfiguration, colonisation. Some societies developed a belief in immutability through history, memory, public edifice. It’s so powerful. It’s because they knew that the world experiences this continuous destruction. What a terrible and horrifying fate!

BA Both in the drawing and animations, you creates your own language. You make images that aren’t necessarily opaque or hard to read, but at the same time I feel like my brain is working, my eyes are actively reading both the still and moving drawings. The drawings feel like artefacts out of time, and for me, that’s very much about how we exist: in a perpetual cycle of positive and negative. The only way to survive is to forget, but forgetting means repeating the same mistakes over and over again. This is a central idea that I’m obsessed with in making my work.  

Christine Rebet, Thunderbird, 2018

CR I’m shocked to see that racism in France has become a normalised situation. Palestine is the same. 

BA Yes, it’s not unique. There have been conflicts since there have been people. 

CR What’s important is that we keep using our form of expression, that we sharpen our critical tools, making sure we’re still growing as part of a discursive, socio-poetic space, challenging consensus.

BA Our greatest resistance is to not martyr ourselves for our work, but to continue. In the art world, even when you have pieces that are intentionally violent or depressing, the ones that stand out for me are those with something else in them: a little bit of tooth, sarcasm, irony, or even just beauty that’s self-aware. It's the straightforward lamenting that I’m not interested in at all. I like this about your work – that there’s this immediate pleasure, because your work is very beautiful, and that’s the first thing you see and then you’re brought into this other world, this other meaning. And that makes me question the experience of pleasure in an idea that’s not inherently pleasurable. For me, art doesn’t seem like the first line of resistance or activism, but it’s always felt very important because it involves more than just the first reaction. It reflects and reinvents. It may not feel as if an artwork reaches the world beyond the museum walls, but I believe the entire process around the production of the work that brought it to the museum is as important as the final product. 

CR. How to address the tumult of the world? How to exorcise the memory of suffering souls? The aura of collective horror? I like to approach film as a collective monument where the after-image revives its own remnants in a poignant and eternal presence. I don’t know whether or not it’ll have an impact in the museum. I’m just thinking it’s important to come up with something that’s true, and then you’ll find out if it’s right. 

BA Through how an audience engages with the work? 

CR My works may be abstract and you might not understand the narrative, but I treat research and subject with passion, humour and candour. I drew my dad when he died, outlined the contour of his soul, and these delicate lines are still alive. I hope I can share this directness and awakeness in my films. 

BA Do you think of it as a collective experience? In my mind, the collective produces an awareness of oneself. A collective where everything is shared is a false idea, or can only be temporary because it relies too much on the individual to make it work. But collectives happen all over the place, without intentionality, and it’s when collectivity is hindered that we suffer. I think about art in the same way, I guess – in it's interconnectedness with everything. 

CR I like to think of it as a kinetic monument addressing a transforming contemporaneity. We have all sorts of live collective exchange. 

BA The collective is also a way to affirm your position in the present. 

CR Wherever you are, especially now, you have to learn how to survive through the present.

Basma Alsharif, Deep Sleep, 2014

Caro Sposo is composed by Marie Canet, Stéphanie Cottin, Clément Dirié, and Caroline Ferreira and is proposing projects around film, video and performance exploring contemporary creation. Cinémathèque Robert-Lynen, 11, rue Jacques Bingen, 75017 Paris. This conversation is from Objektiv #15. 
 

LIEKO SHIGA & MICHAEL FAMIGHETTI

Lieko Shiga, Rasen Kaigan 28, from the Rasen Kaigan series, 2012

Over the past decade, the Japanese photographer Lieko Shiga has created a singular body of work that trades in dreamscapes, intimations of hallucination and dramatic washes of vibrant colour. Elements of the fantastic mark her images; in one, a fireball looms in the air; in another, a naked figure shares a couch with an outsized animal skull. These two images appeared in a series called Canary (2007), now a coveted photobook, which borrowed its name from the expression ‘canary in the coal mine’, used to describe a signal portending danger. Shiga followed up Canary with a body of work called Rasen Kaigan, begun in 2008, and made in Northern Japan, in the small coastal village of Kitakama, which was later destroyed by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. 

While her surreal photographs appear to emerge from the dark recesses of the unconscious, creating them requires careful preparatory work. For Canary, Shiga – working in Brisbane, Singapore and Northern Japan – used a questionnaire to ask her subjects about their relationships to where they lived. In the case of Kitakama, the village’s ineffable qualities and natural beauty inspired her to make work there. However, before using her camera, she first immersed herself in the particulars of the place and made Kitakama her home. She became the village’s official photographer and documented local festivals and ceremonies, learning about the residents and the village’s history. In this way, the residents helped Shiga produce her ghostly but lush images, which are laden with oblique meanings. In a statement about her work, she remarks of her intuitive approach: ‘Rather than thinking about various things before I take a photo, I hope that I will react to an image that leaps out at me through the viewfinder, and I try to remove anything that might get in the way of that response, like the questions “What am I photographing?” or “What is the meaning of this image?”’ 

Michael Famighetti What does the title Rasen Kaigan mean?

Lieko Shiga  Rasen means spiral. Kaigan means coast or shore or beach. But I didn’t want the title to be ‘spiral coast’, because everyone just thinks of Spiral Jetty. I like to leave the meaning abstract and mysterious. I believe that in a photographic space there is no time, and, for me, taking photographs is like a ceremony. The existence of the photograph is totally separate from me, for example, because I am time itself. 

Lieko Shiga, Rasen Kaigan 31, from Rasen Kaigan series, 2010

MF The idea of ceremony is central to your work – not only do you consider the act of making a photograph a form of ceremony, but the actual subjects of your images often feature or relate to folk traditions and ceremonies that are specific to the village of Kitakama, in Northern Japan, where you were the official photographer for some time. 

LS In the end I like to create a space with my camera. This depends on the photograph. Everything has a different approach. I was a village photographer for a few years, and everywhere around me were ceremonies, so I was influenced by that, by the atmosphere and the spirit that comes from the ceremony. There’s a shared atmosphere, and it’s so spiritual. There are many invisible spirits inside of the village. 

MF Do animistic ideas or Shinto religion play into this conception of the spiritual? 

LS No, not at all. I’m just influenced by the more local, more personal, more individual things. I don’t know about Shinto or animism. I’m just influenced by the very local village.

MF Now that you so often exhibit internationally, do you see differences between how your work is perceived within and outside of Japan? Your work is so deeply infused with the nuances and specifics of Kitakama. 

LS For the Rasen Kaigan project, I made lots of written documentation. I tried to include everything in the photobook of that project, so everyone can feel something, to touch their hearts with the spirit of Kitakama. The differences between Japan and over- seas aren’t so much for me. There are, however, lots of Japanese that know that Kitakama was destroyed by the tsunami – sometimes people ask, ‘How does the work relate to the tsunami?’ But that’s another story, because my relationship with the village began before the tsunami. 

MF There’s a distinct aesthetic, use of colour and atmosphere in your images. How did you arrive at this style? 

LS Colour is one of the processes that allow me to create a ceremony and a space within the photograph. I do a lot to the subject – painting things white, spraying red colour on the water, or on the landscape, for example. And of course I love sunsets. Every day there are different colours. I prefer the natural colour. Colour is just the result of my process and my action. I don’t want to calculate anything for the final image, but just follow my intention through a process. That process of creating the photograph is like performance for me. I’ve been influenced by dance and performance – when I was young I was a dancer. My approach to the subject is like a form of choreography. 

MF There’s a sense of movement and orchestration in the pictures. Maybe you could walk us through an image? How about this first image in the layout, a dreamlike scenario dominated by a giant animal skull? 

LS Ah, yes, that’s from the Canary series. That’s a long story, because every photograph has a long story. I have to remember ... That was a long time ago. It was taken in Brisbane, in Australia. I was on a residency. Of course, I could have taken pictures of the town of Brisbane. It’s very easy to take a photo, to just push the button. But to start I made a questionnaire for the people of Brisbane. 

MF You often get to know your subjects through research before you begin a project. Did you send a letter around Kitakama too? 

Lieko Shiga, Out of Eden, from Canary series, 2007

LS That’s the first contact with the people I don’t know, or a place I don’t know, or where I’ve never been before. I don’t know where to start the project. Most of the time, I like to make a friend, or get to know the place well. I could go to the library to research, but instead I like to ask people living there about the place. Then I can create an original map or relationship. That’s why I asked many questions of the people who lived there. Things like, ‘Could you tell me your own personal place where you feel dark or bright? Positive or negative?’ Then I made dots on a map, and marked routes of the journey in Brisbane. Every little thing became a subject of my photographs. For this photo, I met a woman and we became friends. She was a unique woman who collected skulls from the desert outside of the town. One skull was in her garden. I suggested that we could take a picture of her with the skull, but the skull was really small, so I decided to create a huge skull out of plaster and place it next to her on the couch. I brought it to her house, like a present for her. It’s a strange story. 

MF Your practice extends beyond photography – it’s at times sculptural, as in the case above, and there’s also a social practice angle, at least in the way you collaboratively engage your subjects as active participants in helping you to shape projects. You mentioned dance earlier as an influence, and at times you can sense that in the work – the concentration on the body, on gesture. But has film, the moving image, been important to your thinking on photography? 

LS No, for me the space in a photograph is not regulated by time: there’s no past, present or future. By contrast, my body is time itself. My body is the past, present and future. I’m going to die. I get older everyday. I’ve felt this so strongly, since I was a child. That’s why photography is really shocking for me. I can feel that the space inside the photograph is outside of time. Existence for me and the photograph is totally the opposite. Film is time itself – it’s different. But I was influenced by Werner Herzog, the film director. 

MF Which films by Herzog? 

LS Even Dwarves Started Small, Land of Silence and Darkness and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I like everything, especially his attitude. He’s closer to animal than man. 

MF Sure, especially with his obsession with the wildness of the jungle. 

LS Yes, it’s so impressive for me. 

MF Let’s return to the idea of dance and performance as an influence. 

LS When I started out, I was looking at performance, more than photography, old Japanese festivals and dance, as well as Pina Bausch.

Lieko Shiga, Scarecrow party, from Rasen Kaigan series, 2010

MF Do you see your work as performance?

LS My photo-shooting is really like performance. I don’t know the final image when I’m shooting, so I try to call the spirit from the land inside of the photograph. It automatically becomes a performance. The unexpected image comes into my camera. 

MF Do you surprise yourself with your work? 

LS Yes, sometimes the photo-shooting takes a month, sometimes just a few minutes. I keep on until there’s something unexpected, until a strong reality arrives in the photograph. 

MF You travel quite frequently – I recently saw you speak in Sweden, and right now you’re Skyping with me from Los Angeles. You’ve also lived abroad – in London for a number of years, and in Australia as you mentioned. Does such distance impact your work in any way, since what you produce is so often deeply connected with Northern Japan? 

LS After the Rasen Kaigan project, I married a man who lives in Miyagi Prefecture, and I’ve decided to live there forever. I’ve got a root there, and feel really relaxed now. I live in the countryside, so I can enjoy the contrast with being in a place like Los Angeles. 

MF How do you find Los Angeles? 

LS This is actually my second time here. I need a car. With my baby it’s too dangerous – it makes me a bit tired and stressed. But the sunlight is so beautiful, and in contrast to home, everyone is living in the sunshine and relaxed. 

MF How do you approach exhibitions? In Japan the photobook is often viewed as the ideal mode of presenting work, and the exhibition is often secondary to the book. How do you approach the book versus exhibition forms? 

LS In a photobook, the world is closed. People need to open it by hand. It’s a personal and private experience. The book for me is like a paper plane. Because of my photobooks, I receive emails from people on the opposite side of the world, from Africa, from Mexico, from Brazil. Only a few people, by comparison, will see an exhibition. 

An exhibition, or installation, is about creating a space. In a way it’s similar to the process of shooting for me. The exhibition is difficult. A beautiful frame on the white wall is okay – it’s simple and strong – but I like to try to create more of a performative feeling. I want to share the atmosphere of the space. 

MF What are you working on next? 

LS I’m starting something new, slowly, with my baby. It will take a few years. It always takes time. I always need to work for five years. You mentioned the social aspect earlier, but the single image is more important than the process or the social activity. I have to do that work, though, or I wouldn’t create an image. For me, it’s really close to religion, or prayer. Sometimes I think, ‘Am I afraid of death? What am I afraid of? Why do I so desire to photograph?’ Maybe I feel a secret in my body, and so I follow the photographic process to get at that secret. 

Lieko Shiga, Still Unconsious, from Rasen Kaigan series, 2010

DRAGANA VUJANOVIC & ANN-CHRISTIN BERTRAND

Hellen van Meene, Zonder titel, 2014

A conversation between Dragana Vujanovic, Chief  Curator at Hasselblad Foundation, and Ann-Christin Bertrand, Curator at C/O Berlin Foundation.

Nina Strand Our current issue is inspired by the conference, Fast Forward – Women in Photography. First of all, do you have any thoughts on who you’d like to fast forward or rediscover?

Dragana Vujanovic The Norwegian photographers Berg & Høeg come to mind, whose private photographs from the end of the nineteenth century were discovered in the 1990s. The remarkable images show Marie Høeg exploring gender identities, with Bolette Berg behind the camera. The duo remains relatively unknown outside of Scandinavia. A few new prints are part of our collection and were recently included in the exhibition Framing Bodies. They drew a lot of attention from a wide audience. I’d also like to mention Erna Hasselblad, co-founder of the Hasselblad Foundation, a driving force in the Hasselblad company, but historically over-shadowed by her husband Victor. One of our ongoing projects is to highlight her position and draw more attention to her contributions.

Marie Høeg & Bolette Berg, Preus Museum

Ann-Christin Bertrand I’d like to fast forward in a more contemporary direction. I think it’s very interesting to see how digitalisation and the Internet have changed the way we contextualise photography. We’ve just presented the exhibition Marriage is a Lie/Fried Chicken by Victoria Binschtok at C/O Berlin. Since 2001, she’s been tracking the changes regarding our use, perception and distribution of photography in regard to the Internet in a very smart way. But if I look into the past, I’d fast forward the recently re-discovered photographer Lore Krüger, a former student of Florence Henri, whose work we presented at the beginning of this year. The exhibition A Suitcase Full of Pictures was a real discovery and had immense success, both in the media as well as for our audience.

Victoria Binschtok, Marriage is a lie / Fried Chicken, C/O Berlin

DV It’s important not only to bring forth photographers from the past, but also to think about representation in our work today. Being part of an institution, I feel a great responsibility to bear this in mind and evaluate our practice in terms of representation. One of the first things I did when I started working here five years ago was to look at the exhibition history and at the poor representation of women among Hasselblad award winners. Since 2010 we’ve organized fourteen solo shows with women, and eleven with men. In group shows we also strive to achieve a balance, if not 50/50, then at least 40/60.

ACB At C/O Berlin, however, we look at the quality of the work first, and only as a second step whether the work is done by a male or female artist. For us, quality is the most important argument.

DV The work always comes first, and in my opinion, quality isn’t compromised by taking equality into account. One doesn’t exclude the other.

ACB I fully agree. Maybe the best way to describe it is that we take into account ‘human kind’ in general, as well as the quality of his or her artistic work, instead of thinking in terms of gender proportions. When speaking about woman in photography, I think it’s very important to consider social history and the changing circumstances for women within society. Today, however, we have new ways of distributing our work: we can self-publish it or distribute it online. The aspect of sharing, exchanging with each other, working together has become increasingly important. These changing circumstances today make it easier for women. But this is more a social-political aspect than a purely artistic one.

NS A few years ago the Norwegian singer Susanne Sundfør protested while accepting an award for best female singer: ‘I’m a singer, period’, she said on stage. Does anyone really want to be a female photographer/curator?

DV It depends on the context. I think it’s important to be referenced as a female curator in a context where it has political and empowering value. After all, that’s why I’m part of this interview. There’s a difference between shedding light on (overlooked) experiences and portraying stereotypes. I don’t explicitly describe female photographers as women unless it’s a relevant factor. For instance, Ishiuchi Miyako is so far one of only seven women to receive the Hasselblad Award, out of 34 award winners. It was important for us as an institution to highlight this imbalance and also to stress Ishiuchi’s unique position within the male-dominated Japanese photography scene. Another example is Tuija Lindström, a Finnish-Swedish photographer whose work we exhibited a few years ago. During the 1990s she was the first female professor of photography in Sweden, also breaking a male-dominated field and introducing feminist perspectives and a more theoretical and critical approach to photography. These were relevant things to include in our information about her and her role within Swedish photography. In my opinion, not talking about gender when it is significant is maintaining gender-blindness, much like a disregard of racial structural discrimination is maintaining colour-blindness.

Ishiuchi Miyako, ひろしま Hiroshima #9, 2007, © Ishiuchi Miyako

ACB I absolutely agree with Dragana. Nevertheless, let me point out an aspect that came up at the Tate symposium in 2014: one woman sitting in the audience said she didn’t want to be brought into the context of ‘women in photography’, since she was afraid belonging to a ‘minority’ would make her work less valuable. I understand her worries. Also, why does it have to be only women in a symposium about women in photography? Why not open up the discussion to male participants? We should continue to talk about it, in smaller groups, everywhere and with everybody, not only once a year and not only with women.

DV Of course, we should highlight the work first and foremost, but being aware of the structural discrimination facing certain groups, and trying to reflect the field of photography in a more balanced way is crucial. Not considering gender and race is simply not an option today, especially not from an institutional point of view. In my experience, this awareness doesn’t somehow lead to diminished value – quite the opposite. It’s a problem that art institutions are predominantly male, white and straight.

NS I’ve just read Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, in which her main character, artist Harriet Burden, let’s three different male artists exhibit her art to see if the work will read differently.  I loved the book, and wondered if it rings true for other people?

ACB Siri Hustvedt is one of my favorite authors and I read the book this summer. I really liked it for its intelligence. It raises very important questions about how we look at art, how we perceive it. And it criticises the powerful influence of the art market or art world on our perception of an artwork. It also questions very important gender aspects – the fact that there are still more male than female players in the field, and at the same time is a brilliant observation of our art-market strategies and functionalities. It’s a very smart contribution to gender and art discussions and I just hope that it will ring true for far more people.

NS While working on this issue it’s become clear to me how many institutions are led by men. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this.

ACB This is another important question regarding the gender discussion. Indeed, when it comes to leadership positions within the art world, it’s striking that – apart from a few female curators and directors - women are rarely in the higher positions, at least not in Germany. And in the photography world, this situation might even be a bit better than in the other media, as photography is a quite open and democratic medium. Here, there’s surely still a lot to do. What would you say about Scandinavia? Is it different there?

DV Not really. The art world is dominated by women in all positions except leadership, which is the case in many professional fields. And with few women and, more importantly, with few feminists in leading positions, change happens slowly. We try to keep this in mind when we put together the Hasselblad award committees. Small decision-making groups like these need to consist of people who are aware of the issues of representation.

Helen van Meene, Zonder titel, 2015,

ACB That’s right. As an institution, we also try to have a balance between international female and male experts when it comes to our committees, e.g. regarding our Talents programme. In this context, there’s another aspect that seems interesting to me, which Brett Rogers once mentioned and which we’ve also observed for several years: that in the younger generation, there are even more female than male artists, but when it comes to the mid-career generation, there are fewer women. There’s a Rineke Dijkstra, or a Hellen van Meene, for example, – but they’re exceptions. For their generation, it wasn’t at all usual to become established, and when you did it was over a longer period of time. This I think is a question of generation and is changing nowadays. The conference at Tate  Modern shows that we have a stronger awareness of this, and many aspects have changed in society and in the artistic field itself, which makes it easier for women to continue working even if they have children.

DV The question is whether or not the younger photographers are still as active in their late thirties and forties. Many of the issues regarding family and work are still not resolved for women, in most professional fields, not only photography. I’ve just remembered another project – fitting for this conversation – that should be fast-forwarded: Ann Christine Eek’s series from the 1970s titled Working – not slaving to death, about women’s double labour. It’s interesting that this thirty-year old project is very much a contemporary topic.

ACB I think we should see things positively. There are more and more women who are continuing to work even when they have a family. The female artists we’ve presented recently, or are going to present soon, like Niina Vatanen, Viktoria Binchtok or Viviane Sassen, all have children, and they’re still working. I think it’s also, besides social structures, a question of personality.

NS I hope this conference will be an eye-opener that will help us actually reach the desired balance.

DV The conference is highly relevant. It’s important not to relax and think that we’re there already, because we still have a long way to go.

Ann Christine Eek, Annikki, hospital ordely, on her way home with the children. (Nacka, February 1974)

CHARLOTTE COTTON & BJARNE BARE

Dalston Anatomy, 2013, Lorenzo Vitturi. Photo by Petter Berg.

During the last two decades, Charlotte Cotton has been at the forefront of developments in contemporary photography. Artist and gallery owner Bjarne Bare talks to her about institutional challenges and what the future might bring for the medium.

Bjarne Bare Through your various positions, writings and discourse, you’ve been a close witness to the changes in photography over the course of your career, which has taken place over an interesting couple of decades for the medium. Could we start by talking about institutions? You’ve been involved in both institutional spaces as-well-as commercial and independent initiatives, and online projects. I run a non-commercial space myself, and I believe that both commercial and non-commercial spaces have responsibilities in shaping local scenes and thus influencing artists in constructive dialogues. Although larger institutions might be stronger on academic discourse, commercial spaces can bring a visual dialogue by showing refreshing new talent. The role for smaller independent spaces could be to create a closer dialogue with artist and audience. I believe this balance is crucial for the local scene, as well as the international one. How do you see this “dance” working out between various spaces and thus the overall discourse? Does photography differ from contemporary art in general?

Charlotte Cotton  I find it really difficult to characterise the changes that have taken place over the twenty years I’ve been working with photographic culture. The subject and the context of the photographic has changed, and I’ve found that about every three years I seem to be working with a new set of militating factors that shape the frame of my thinking. I do feel very lucky that my training was at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where I started working as an intern in 1992. It’s an institution that was founded as, and is still – just about – operating as a place of public service. It was a blessing to be in a position to think about photography as a broad terrain of uses and outcomes and also observe the rapid development of the idea of photography as contemporary art through the 1990s from a vantage point that still had the patina of Victorian ideas about public access to culture. I learnt about photography as a part of material culture and a demonstration of human endeavour, rather than as a subsection of the story of modern and contemporary art with the concomitant concept of art photography as a commodity within a neoliberal marketplace. Because I began my curatorial career in the early 1990s, I developed my relationship with photography partially in a historical mode – it was seen as an underdog section of artistic culture, shaped by its twentieth-century proponents, who formed a separatist history and identity in order to forge the medium’s cultural legitimacy. At the same time, I was learning how to be a curator alongside the first generation of art-school graduates who were confidently creating contemporary art photography, works that were intended to operate within the wider discourses of contemporary art. A general sense of the coexistences that are possible in the photographic realm has been an enduring interest of mine. Bjarne, I’d love to hear from you about your start in photography and how you think it shaped your approach. 

BB It’s this rather schizophrenic aspect of photography that’s been keeping me up at night. Your voyage, starting at the V&A, seems ideal for mapping out the various views, uses and opinions regarding a medium that has become accepted to such an extent in society that people rarely seem to question its existence or hidden layers of meanings. My introduction to photography came about as a clichéd image, starting with a trip to Mekhong, where I met a rather flamboyant Russian photojournalist who smoked opium and shot photos with an ancient Nikon F1. I was nineteen at the time, and I began to romanticise the idea of the war photographer: the possible influence one might have within news media, saving the world through important imagery. Photography then brought me to Cairo to meet with professional war photographers, only to hear their stories about the invasion of Iraq and to realise that even the pure war photographers seemed to have become part of a game, where journalism is allowed into certain rooms in the party and the backstage is filled with others who control the guest list. It didn’t suit my romantic vision of the photographic image, and I lost faith in true journalism.

I then looked to art, since it seemed the only place left where a pure dialogue could be had within photography. Here, I also found freedom in terms of storytelling and truth, and a large potential for creation. Tacita Dean has said that ‘in order to deal with fact, it’s best to resort to fiction’. For me, this might be the core of my interest in contemporary art photography, and why I think the medium has evolved in the right direction over the past decade. It seems to have shifted away from the classic narrative of the photography exhibition where every image tells a story, and into a situation where the exhibition space functions more as a total installation and each work contributes to the larger narrative. Here, I believe that photography is finally moving towards contemporary art in its understanding of communication. After all, art boils down to communication. Do you share this idea of the changes within so called art-photography, and do you believe it’s moved further away from other types of photography in recent years?

CC The best photographic practices that I’ve seen haven’t so much moved away from other types of photography, but rather acknowledge the contemporary condition of image-making: namely, that it’s no longer useful to think of photographic practice as pivoting around fixed ideas of types of photographers and better to accept the very unfixed nature of how artistic practice navigates the contemporary media ecology. The photographic practices that resonate for me are clearly embedded within our image-making and disseminating culture. It’s important to acknowledge that embeddedness for what it is: a necessarily close position from which to pinpoint the important things that are happening within our pervasive visual systems. It’s not primarily a strategy for the adoption of the language and behaviour of photographs within mass media and social circulation for its own sake, but the best vantage point from which real and close attention to the incipient nature of image culture can be paid. These artists aren’t venturing out into the broad terrain of image culture to gather up material to take back to a fixed and detached space defined as art – or indeed photojournalism or commercial image-making. If they were, then I think we could call photography the art of the illustrator. The creative processes that I am drawn to rely on finding points of interest and properly reflecting on their meaning and causality. This position enables open-ended practices to unfold. Such practices are at the heart of human creativity and the enduring – pre-photographic – desire to make marks that delineate and are comprehended in our time.

What I also respond to in your previous reply is the sense that it’s important to you that photography is a discursive space – that it’s a discussion between practitioners and viewers, an acceptance that within a ubiquitous image culture, photographic capture is something that’s shared between photographers and their audience.

BB  I agree that open-ended practices are the ideal, but they require open-minded practitioners and audiences across disciplines within the medium. I believe this occurs most often in the field of independent publishing, where practitioners have developed a playful approach to the finished work, while it seems to me that the exhibition format still obtains a certain seriousness. This could simply be because the publishing scene is mainly driven by a new generation of practitioners. Within photography, I feel there’s a strong conservative mass, possibly driven by the market, photography fairs or certain medium-specific museums. In photobook-making and self-publishing there’s an open approach to aesthetics, source and output, where sharing is the ideal. Simultaneously, I do have the constant feeling that although photography has evolved technically, as well as becoming increasingly available, the intellectual level hasn’t followed suit. We’re still in a situation where a direct message translates better to the audience than a more complex photograph containing several layers of dialogue. Again, I believe this multi-layered dialogue is found more often within art, and thus is more appealing to me, though I might be the conservative one here. Is this a view you share, and if so, how do you grapple with this when curating a large show for an institution such as The Photographers Gallery, V&A or LACMA, which have such varied audiences?

CC Publishing has been a flourishing area for photographic creativity for a number of reasons. Firstly, the stakes aren’t so high. What I mean by that is that as digital printing has reanimated the small print-run area of photobook publishing, the gap has opened up for photographic projects to embody the book as its primary form, unmodified by the conventions of trade-book publishing. The production costs are potentially less than those of an exhibition and a book is capable of directly reaching an international audience. It’s easy to list the small number of bookstores in cities in Europe and the Americas that will take copies of new books from artists. You can promote and sell directly online and thus reach the niche, and very knowledgeable, audience of fellow practitioners for whom this current creative energy means something. This process doesn’t involve intersecting and negotiating with large and traditional structures like major publishing houses or, indeed, museums and galleries. But I think the book form is also a good ideogram for contemporary photographic practices with their meaning bound up in a dynamic process of production and distribution as inseparable parts of the process of making contemporary art.

When I think about how my own curatorial practices have intersected with this diversification of creativity and the way that we see and talk about it, it’s rarely been in the form of an exhibition in the institutions at which I have worked. Where I have felt this synergy with actual creative practices is when I’ve been curating contemporary fashion photography exhibitions. The nature of fashion photography has pushed me to think about how you narrate the cultural meaning of the collective efforts (rather than single authorship) of image-makers, and how you narrate very temporary stories intended for the lifetime of magazines, not the ‘in perpetuity’ of museums. When I was working at LACMA, I think it was the non-exhibition elements of the programme that carried that discursive spirit, and in particular the website and live discussions that curator and artist Alex Klein, designer David Reinfurt and I created as part of Words Without Pictures. I’m interested in how museums can create iterative frameworks and host the urgent discussions that practitioners want to have. In the past two years, I’ve mainly been teaching in art schools, writing and participating in exhibition projects with other curators. For me, it feels very much like a time to participate in new things and talk out the possibilities rather than try to set things in institutional stone, as it were.

Emil Salto, One hand, and then the other, 2014, Cornerkiosk Press

BB Lowering the stakes and creating effective distribution channels has certainly helped numerous young practitioners to go global while maintaining a relevant local scene. On the other hand, nothing is better than experiencing a large-scale, well-produced exhibition that can ultimately function as a vehicle for inspiration and dreams. Referring back to the open-ended dialogue you mentioned earlier, do you believe it’s possible for larger institutions to achieve more direct dialogue? Since institutions have a responsibility for a broad audience who might be used to the standard formula, I imagine it must be hard to break that core. Do you have any ideas about this, and about the type of practitioners that these institutions should involve to create a more open dialogue? Is it only possible through non-exhibition elements, or have you witnessed successful exhibitions that managed to bridge this gap? Words Without Pictures certainly seemed a step in the right direction, involving the audience directly, as well as the web. Do you feel this happens more easily now that you’re outside the institutional system, and possibly working on shorter-term projects?

CC I agree that what makes this such a game-changing time for photographic ideas is that it’s practitioner-led rather than being defined as a movement within institutions and academia. I imagine it will always be hard for innovative practices to lead the narrative of institutional writing and exhibitions, rather than being subsumed as the ‘illustrations’ for overarching curatorial ideas. Some institutions and some curators find ways to frame their exhibitions that are at least fronted by the idea of ‘practice-led’, with strong intellectual arguments that sensitively survey contemporary artistic practices on their own terms and in rapid, flexible programmes that bring a lot of new ideas into the context of galleries and museums. Some of the more successful institutional and curatorial strategies are ones that consciously attempt to embody the momentum of now – rapidly changing, providing more than one version of the story of contemporary practice, thinking of their desired audiences as going on a journey with the institution and curator. I suppose it’s about creating structures that provide possibilities rather than the definite, concretised idea of contemporary practice. This is one of the reasons why the biennial and triennial format is so successful now – you can make an explicit and definite statement but within a context where there’s another – different but equally strong – statement on the horizon.

Another analogy that you raised earlier is the difference between the rapidity of photobook publishing (and the expanding of the idea of a book into the territory that was traditionally that of the magazine), and the conventional trade book that was the sum total, set-in-stone conveyance of ideas. For me, curating and publishing should mirror contemporary practices in being iterative and inputting into the discourses and dynamics that are at play right now, rather than being about the ring-fencing or historicising of some sections of contemporary artists’ work that can be plausibly made to fit into the linear story of contemporary art as it’s been told so far.

BB Is the practitioner-led aspect part of bringing down traditional hierarchies within the arts? In other non-art aspects of photography, this seems to be the case, but possibly not in favour of photography, since it seems that practitioners are now handling more than one task in the process, often due to budgets. In journalism this seems to be the case, and also in fashion and advertising.

CC I don’t think we’re seeing the dismantling of the traditional hierarchies of arts organisations. That may of course just be a generational consequence: the fact that there simply aren’t enough people at the top of management structures who have a genuine interest in bringing about change that’s responsive to the momentum of creative practices right now or the seismic shift in our collective visual consciousness in the twenty-first century. The business plan of the culture industry places its trust in monographic exhibitions and artists with track records in the market. I don’t think the culture industries are in any way in a different situation at this stage of neoliberalism from their cousins in the creative industries. If you look at feature-filmmaking, the two areas of confidence are the large action-movie blockbusters and the crowd-sourced, ground-swelling independent movies with all their innovation and timeliness. Culture is also polarised in this way, with major museum exhibitions at one end of the scale and artist and independent curator-led initiatives at the other.

BB I think one of the reasons for the popularity of the biennale (and at times the less interesting but equally popular art fair), is that there are fewer set systems. The players change with every edition, always bringing in new hierarchies of curators, artists and thus audiences – keeping the discourse fresh and relevant. This occurs especially in the biennale format, which usually manages to blend all media into a whole. The photography biennales I feel are less relevant, possibly due to a smaller field of players. Although I run a photography space myself, and this conversation is due to be published in a photography journal, I feel we should work towards making these spaces redundant, aiming for a more open dialogue between media. Why do you think there are so many medium-specific galleries, journals, biennales and fairs for photography, while the other arts blend naturally?

CC Photo biennales and festivals have a mixed heritage. They weren’t born out of this era of global contemporary art biennials and art fairs, but had more photographer-led starting points, often in the 1970s, and were forums for practitioners and a small band of supporters to get together to see and talk over what was new. Some, but not all, current photo festivals still carry that heritage, as if photography were a separatist medium. Personally I don’t think that’s true, or at least the narratives and discourses of these festivals aren’t pluralistic or responsive enough to what’s actually happening in photographic practices. Festivals can run the risk of being the meeting point for historical cliques or those who feel disenfranchised from the growth of photography as contemporary art, which is quite ironic given that in the formation of the idea of photography as a cultural subject in the postwar period, its members had to come from somewhere else because the field didn’t exist. If photography festivals continue to be relevant, it will be because they create structures that are actively diverse and make genuine enquiries into the shifting terms of the photographic, both within the context of contemporary art and also within our media ecology at large. I think festivals are better when they align with practitioners and not the market-driven systems of major institutions.

BB I’m interested in how photography has evolved within the exhibition space. The photograph’s ability to show a more complex multilayered message comes forth as photographic exhibitions blend works that don’t seem to fit together at first glance, but create a message as a whole. I see this development more often in galleries and institutions focusing on more than one medium, as if this approach comes from contemporary art rather than the photography world. In addition, I see more and more exhibitions including spatial elements in dialogue with the framed photographic works, thus pointing at the photograph as an object in dialogue with the spatial matter in the room. In this sense, how do you see the future of photography in exhibitions and museum collections? I recall you once stated it was at risk of becoming the watercolour of museum collections.

CC What I meant by the danger of photography becoming a historical form of creativity akin to the watercolour is the risk that photographic practices will stay fixed to their conventions and not re-calibrate so that they still have real relationships with the defaults of today’s image environment. I don’t think that there is this separate intellectual space called art; photographic artists are embedded within the dynamic of the wider visual culture. What you’re alluding to is that often the most timely exhibitions of contemporary practice have made a complete break from the editorial, linear mode of photographic sequencing that morphed from the magazine page to the gallery wall in the late twentieth century. Or indeed, the vogue in the late twentieth century for stand-alone, painting-like tableaux photographs that you were expected to study in isolation. I think you’re talking about installations that may bring photographic qualities into the space of art that come from another area, but done in such a way as to bring each photographic element into a constellation of photographic standpoints whose meaning comes from these contingent relations.

I’m aware that I’m describing the rhizome model of cultural production. The rhizome is a useful model for thinking about the way in which we create dynamic maps of seemingly disparate forms of ideas, their meaning held in the constantly changing connections we make between them. It’s a useful way of thinking about not only the structures of some of the most interesting photographic gallery installations but also the shared way in which we create meaning with the viewer. Just as some of the best artists who work with photographic ideas are constantly questioning and shifting their practices in response to our image world, I’d like to imagine that institutions feel a parallel responsibility not to solidify their working practices. It’s hard to envision such open-ended practices if you view the museum’s responsibilities as exclusively to collect and exhibit objects that are the final resolution of artistic ideas. But if we viewed museums as spaces that also host new ideas that come from outside their collecting purview, sites for open discussion, centres for publishing and disseminating ideas about contemporary human endeavour, and you made this the substantive archive of record, then I think we’d have more belief in what institutions can provide at this mercurial point in photographic culture.

BB If the rhizome model can be used to inform contemporary photographic production, and if I understand the theory right, it does indeed point towards an open-ended dialogue, where several aspects of production inform each other simultaneously, thus creating new perspectives. This is an aspect that I often miss within photographic discourse. Stub by Linn Pedersen (2010) is a good illustration of the rhizome theory. It’s a theory that can point to the core of the ideal practice, not only in terms of exhibitions, but already manifested in book-making and other forms of photography as you mention. You said once that when you started curating, the scene was still dominated by shows focusing on the history of photography, as if the medium were still new to the public. With the young generation growing up with media such as Instagram, making them capable of reading small images swiftly, perhaps we’ll see a strong photographic understanding in the coming generations. As photography spreads so fast, however, the Benjaminian ‘aura’ that photography has struggled to build up over the past century might fade. People are now talking about post-photography; do you feel that the digital photograph distances itself from the genuine analogue photograph by losing its indexicality through the computer process? If so, do you feel that photography is suffering or strengthened in the postinternet/digital generation?

CC Actually, I don’t share that concern that something will be lost, although I do sympathise with such reservations. I don’t think that the actuality of our media environment should stop anyone continuing along the path of a practice that was set in the last century, but what it means to do so has shifted profoundly due to the context of contemporary practice. I definitely share with you a great optimism that artists working with photographic ideas are entirely capable of keeping up with the behaviours and nuanced visual capacities of their viewers. Today’s artists are better considered as shaping their practices as entry points that are legible within the epoch of the maker-consumer, interpreting what’s already the contemporary viewing experience for the dynamic of their work. Contemporary practice doesn’t take specific forms per se – it includes artists working with traditional materials (such as photographic prints, knowingly deployed for their auratic materiality) just as much as artists directly using the vernacular language of online culture, encapsulating the actual and symbolic pervasive impact it has had on the ways we make, consume and read visual culture. We could talk about ‘post-photography’ in the sense of photography as a medium and a discrete discipline of art being a defined entity, but I think the photographic is alive and well; a fitting adjective rather than a solidified noun.

Dalston Anatomy, 2013, Lorenzo Vitturi. Photo by Petter Berg.