#51
PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR — Lucie Award
The Mythical Issue
FOCUS ESSAYS 20 Introduction 27 A Spiritual Journey 85 Visions and Tales 155 Imagined and Performed 205 Parallel Reality 266 Endnote
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PORTFOLIOS
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33 Nicola Lo Calzo 49 Orpheus Standing Alone 67 Martin Gusinde 75 Filip Berendt 93 Christiane Peschek 109 Patrick Willocq 127 Jeff Wall 145 Tereza Zelenkova 161 Igor Samolet 177 Joseph Beuys 187 Andy Kassier 213 He Bo 221 Osborne Macharia 231 Tacita Dean 249 Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukรกcs
The seer is a visionary, creating ways of understanding, or framing things that at first appear otherworldly, impossible or irrational. Their Âinterpretations enter our systems of belief and understanding. Who is the author: the seer who creates the stories or the believer who adopts and acts upon them? The photographer can transform and create connections through Âenvisioning stories from ancient times to contemporary life. Through a process of endless repetition and re-interpretation it becomes a timeless given: a myth existing at the junction where fact and fiction collide. And at the end, we believe what we see, or do we?
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Contents FEATURES ON MY MIND Alessia Glaviano Adam Greenfield Eyal Landesman Anna-Alix Koffi
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BOOKSHELF
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of David Solo
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WHAT’S NEW Jinkyun Ahn Eva O’Leary
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INTERVIEW with Florian Ebner by Clare Strand
SEER / BELIEVER
INTRODUCTION: Seer/Believer by Marcel Feil
A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY Essay by Kim Knoppers
33 NICOLA LO CALZO Text by Iliana Cepero
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ORPHEUS STANDING ALONE Text by Magali Nachtergael
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MARTIN GUSINDE Text by Taco Hidde Bakker
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FILIP BERENDT
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Essay by Jörg Colberg
CHRISTIANE PESCHEK
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PATRICK WILLOCQ Text by Drew Thompson
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JEFF WALL Text by David Bate
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TEREZA ZELENKOVA Text by David Campany
IGOR SAMOLET JOSEPH BEUYS Text by Caroline von Courten
187 205 213
ANDY KASSIER Text by Katrina Sluis
PARALLEL REALITY Essay by Daria Tuminas
HE BO Text by Marine Cabos
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OSBORNE MACHARIA Text by Ytasha L. Womack
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TACITA DEAN Text by Tacita Dean
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Text by Sharon Sliwinski
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Essay by Mark Alice Durant
Text by Louis Kaplan
Text by Dominik Czechowski
VISIONS AND TALES
IMAGINED AND PERFORMED
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BROERSEN & LUKÁCS Text by Mirjam Kooiman
ENDNOTE Essay by Joan Fontcuberta
Marloes Krijnen Editor-in-Chief
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Editorial
The mythical. An idea – and word – so well used, pored over and photographed, it gave us pause as to what precisely we were aiming to present in this issue of Foam Magazine #51. As an adjective, and a device, myth has carved a path for itself right alongside photo graphy, in part due to their shared and active roles in creating, recreating and understanding the stories we tell ourselves. Starting from a point of curiosity, we set our sights and cast our nets far and wide to bring in a range of projects that were inspired by, or grew out of investigations into myth making, storytelling, journeys into the unknown, and spiritual undertakings. Stories are activated when told, re-told and listened to. This encounter between the seer, who shares visions and the believer, who receives them, captured our fascination; so explaining the link between the two. We recognised that our interest lay in the junction of when, where and how myth is made. Our search brought us to this set of artists and portfolios where the transformative power of the mythical can be seen and felt on the page. In this collection of images, the past, present and future are threaded throughout, and loose chapters pick out shared approaches in the diverse bodies of work. They invite you, as readers, to embrace the role of both seer and believer.
The rituals, rites of passage and epic, spiritual journeys that are often the inspiration for exploring and navigating the mythical are signified in the works by Nicola Lo Calzo, Orpheus Standing Alone, Martin Gusinde, and Filip Berendt. The nature of having to suspend disbelief in order to immerse oneself in the cinematic is dealt with in the works of Broersen & Lukács and Tacita Dean while the singular image approach asks viewers to invest in a snapshot of a story, for example, in the works of Jeff Wall or Tereza Zelenkova. The artist as the ‘seeing performer’ or the ‘performing seer’ takes centre stage in the third chapter with Joseph Beuys’s impressive, though lesser known photographic work, and with a nod to the humorous side of things as shown in the works of Igor Samolet and Andy Kassier. Last but not least, there can be no myth without a hidden side; hence the phantom portfolio by Scarfolk. As always, we have embraced the chance to work with writers who have a specialism or affinity for the topics addressed in the portfolios. In this issue of Foam Magazine, we welcome many new contributors who are writing for us for the first time. Their nuance and insight leads us further into the work for an encounter at more than surface level, both in the chapter essays and the portfolio essays. Three artists take on the role of
writer: Tacita Dean, Clare Strand and Joan Fontcuberta. In a closing essay, Fontcuberta reflects on the function of fiction in an era of post-truth, drawing on his own artistic strategies. In the interview feature, acclaimed photographer Clare Strand guides a conversation with Florian Ebner, one year after becoming Head of the photography department at the Centre Pompidou. In it, Florian Ebner shares his take on photography in a continuation, on paper, of an informal conversation taking place over the years since he exhibited Strand’s work in 2009 at the Museum für Photography in Braunschweig. David Solo, long-time friend of Foam and book lover, has shared a selection of photobooks that pair photo graphy and poetry. These books offer interesting approaches on cross artform collaborations. We also take this opportunity to congratulate Eva O’Leary – an early Foam Talent – on winning this year’s Hyères Festival Photographie Grand Prix by showing her work in our What’s New? feature. We hope this issue gives you an intriguing and inspiring starting point for both seeing and believing in the mythical while setting out on a spiritual journey where visions and tales are imagined and performed in a parallel reality.
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Filip Berendt
Monomyth For his Monomyth series, begun in 2015, Filip Berendt combines black and white photographs and geometric blocks of colour to create highly charged works depicting a personal and mythological journey. He reprises a process used in a previous body of work whereby he photographs (and then destroys) spatial compositions assembled on the wall of his studio. The resulting images reflect his background in sculpture, graphics, painting and photographic practice. As the title suggests, this new series conjures up the monomyth, or myth of the Hero — an anthropological figure established by American author and theorist Joseph Campbell through his work in comparative mythology. Campbell’s influential book The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949) delineated what he termed the ‘hero’s journey’, a universal narrative pattern which forms nearly every culture’s mythical framework. The hero embarks upon a ritualistic quest of adventure and personal psychological development — a trajectory that unites all the most important primordial tales in human history. The three main stages, or rites of passage, in any hero’s journey are departure (or ‘separation’), initiation, and return. Through a series of 12 challenging, transformative thresholds (all vicissitudes leading up to the final test/ordeal that results in a cathartic rapture) heroes bring new ways of seeing and being that nourish their cultures of origin, whilst undergoing a profound inner change and transition of the self (akin to the Greek hero Odysseus). Monomythical heroes include deities such as Christ, B uddha, or Muhammad alongside mythical figures such as Osiris, Prometheus and Moses. Campbell borrowed the term from a passage in Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce to define the synthesis of mythology and belief that unify human experience and stories across time, culture, religion and continents. His thinking also parallels the Jungian psychology
p. 75 of archetypes — constantly repeating characters or energies, which can be said to occur in the collective unconsciousness (‘myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths’). Berendt’s impulse (personal and artistic) towards uncovering the heart of the (mono)myth resulted from direct experience of using ayahuasca, a natural hallucinogen. This psychedelic plantbased infusion originated in the Amazon and was initially used for a ritual of solitary (shamanic) transition into the unknown in order to contact the spirit world and bring knowledge back to the tribe. Nowadays, users are encouraged to set ‘an intention’ when physically, mentally, and spiritually preparing for the ayahuasca journey. Berendt experimented with the substance purposefully over nearly two years in a variety of locations worldwide as a way to help reach the myths buried in our subconscious — his prime aim to encounter the classic monomyth as described by Campbell. The immersion in mysticism, or quest to the ‘journey within’ (Romain Rolland), derives from a deep interest in a spiritual realm beyond the phenomenological worldview.
Through his explorations of ayahuasca, Berendt embarked on a research expedition of sorts that produced works acting as an intuitive documentation of that research through the process of fabrication and re-membering, rather than plain depictions of delirious states resulting from drinking the plant brew. With the aid of the drug and through the self-perpetuated, neo-shamanic process (performance) of self transcendence, Berendt emerged from his clairvoyant trip bringing back artworks of personal discovery and universal appeal: complex accounts of his visions. The Monomyth series bridges the separated-ness of an inner world as experienced by the individual hero (the artist), with the desire for understanding human existence and its collective spirit. Through the dynamic interplay between the found photographs, appropriated imagery and abstract planes of vivid colour in geometric arrangements, the artist digs deep into shared cultural repositories and renders them (in)visible whilst archiving the outcomes of his personal hero’s journey. Deliberate usage of black-and-white photographs harks back to the medium’s history and suggests a distant temporality, further indicating the mnemonic, flashback nature of the drug-induced trip and its disjointed retrospective narrative. Highlighting the complexities of the monomyth and collapsing its many l ayers and dimensions, Berendt has created a peculiar and uncanny portrayal of selfexamination: an intuitive expression of the inner journey in search of the importance and power of the myth, and for, in Campbell’s words, ‘an experience of being alive’. — Text by Dominik Czechowski
All images from the series Monomyth, 2018 © Filip Berendt, courtesy of the artist
a spiritual journey where
VISIONS AND TALES are imagined and performed in a parallel reality.
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Patrick Willocq
I am Walé Respect Me / Forever Walé Walé translates in English to ‘nursing mother’, and refers to a pygmy woman between the ages of 14 and 18 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Walés enter into seclusion with their firstborn shortly after giving birth. Under the care of their mother and other female elders, the Walés are un able to farm and prepare their own food. Instead, they learn how to raise their child, and they enter into a supernatural world, one where they are superior to other women and have the power to fly amongst birds and airplanes. Two to three years after going into seclusion, Walés return to their commu nities. Self-taught, French-born photo grapher Patrick Willocq (who spent his formative childhood years in DRC) listened to hours of songs — created and practised in isolation — performed by the Walés upon their return. An ethno musicologist from the region helped Willocq translate the songs. Afterwards, Willocq made sketches, or what he de scribed as ‘visual interpretations’ of the recordings. With the help of local com munity members, Willocq built life-size stages modelled on his sketches for the Walés to re-enact their songs. Willocq photographed the scenes of individuallyperformed songs and organised them into an exhibition series and book titled Songs of Walés. In the opening image, a Walé, who nick named herself Beautiful (Asongwaka) pilots an airplane. The backdrop includes other modern passenger jets like the ones that fly overhead at night. Beauti ful never saw the planes she heard, but she did sing about having the money to fly a ‘European plane’. In other songs, Walés compare themselves to bats, caterpillars, and leopards in order to convey their uniqueness, beauty, and strength. Within sets, they pose like their spirit animals.
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Their painted nude bodies adorned with animal skins and headdresses — the clothing of kings who came before and after them — is no less cosmopolitan than the suits and dresses their coun terparts wear to dance clubs and photo graphy studios in cities like Kinshasa and Lubumbashi. Not disconnected from this symbolism is the straw mate rial which Walés use to perform the only permissible act of work while in isola tion: basket weaving. More literally, the straw gives them flight, while also acting as a backdrop to create the figurative, less caricatured elements of their songs. The Walés never imagined acting out these songs in front of a camera. To view these photographs is to see how Walés see themselves in relation to the people and spaces around them before, during, and after seclusion.
The photographs are not collages or montages. The scenes are intricately built yet fleeting. A small window opens to photograph at the end of the day when, as he remarked, ‘the sun gets lost in the clouds’. Set builders suspended figures using ropes, further compound ing the time factor. Willocq prints the scenes large scale and on cotton paper to enhance the color and patterns cap tured through natural lighting, making it difficult to distinguish the natural from the artificial, the real from the imaginary. Willocq is not merely a facilitator and documentarian. He is keen to offer his own interpretation, composing scenes inspired by the voyeuristic French painter Paul Gauguin, and wanting to dispatch with the style of reportage. Willocq acknowledges that photography is responsible for producing an image of the DRC as war-torn and impoverished. At exhibitions of this work, he reminds people they are looking at songs that until now eluded photographic transla tion. The construction of the stage and the re-enactment of the song are what make it possible for Willocq to take a picture. Photographing is a means of recording, and it concludes the creative exchange between Willocq, the Walés, and surrounding communities. — Text by Drew Thompson
All images from the series I am Walé Respect Me, 2013 and Forever Walé, 2014 © Patrick Willocq, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Project 2.0, Den Haag
Jeff Wall Reconstructions
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Joseph Beuys
Arena — Dove sarei arrivato se fossi stato intelligente! A slightly crumpled, sepia coloured souvenir picture card opens this set of seven panels in Joseph Beuys’s Arena — where would I have got if I had been intelligent!. Entitled Verona Arena, it is the only image that is not Beuys’s own photograph or, more accurately to say, not one of Ute Klophaus’s photographs (as she photographed most of his Aktionen/performances and installation pieces). Mounted singularly and centre stage within one of the 100 grey painted panels, it is a visual footnote to the title and to Beuys’s mind-set when installing his own arena of photographs at the Modern Art Agency in Naples in 1972. The 100 heavy aluminium panels, each of an identical size and designed by himself, were leaning against the walls winding around the entirety of the rec tangular gallery space; some even stapled, blinding the sight onto the panels b ehind, as if storing this photgraphic archive just as staging it. During the opening night in June 1972, Beuys lay on the gallery floor, for almost three hours, encircled by photographic remnants of concerts, performances, objects, materials, tools, and personal moments dating between 1949 and 1971. Wearing a wreath made of a vine branch on his head like Bacchus, Beuys rubbed continuously the sides of two copper plates with his oiled fingers (this gesture of anointment leads us to Beuys’s identification with Christ — agnus castus — God’s pure lamb). In this performance Vitex agnus castus, Beuys slowly reached a state of electrified trembling that shivered through his whole body culminating in Dionysian excess and, at the same time, a state of suffering, while he repetitively shouted ‘Ich strahle aus!’ (I am radiating!). The silver gelatine process — based on the receptiveness of silver halides to radiating light in order to react and form the photographic image on photosensitive paper — could be regarded as suitable material for Beuys to capture emitted
p. 177 energy and therewith to prove its presence. A silver gelatine photograph is but the visible record of energy that has been transformed into a static constellation of atomic silvers. However, for two reasons Beuys was sceptical towards photographic representations: the first lingers in the name of the fluxus movement (which Beuys joined in the sixties) as flowing or fluid opposed to the ‘frozen’ trait of a photograph. The second is rooted in Beuys’s general scepticism towards art’s primary occupation with visibility overruling and ignoring the other senses to perceive hidden powers. The camera is pre-eminently an exten sion of human sight, which Beuys asso ciated with the ‘cold’ or analytical side of modern life that he contrasts with his ‘warm’, more intuitive and inclusive worldview. So, there is a lot we do not see in Arena’s silver gelatine photographs as they are either out of focus, torn, cropped, overpainted with wax or sulphur, badly lit, poorly developed, treated with acid or otherwise obscured.
The way Beuys composed each frame does not follow any (chrono)logical order or aesthetic reasoning. Maybe more appropriate is to wonder what we perceive in case we see them with all our senses? What if we foremost witness the energy released from Beuys’s r ituals and objects although all there is, are traces of traces of traces of …? In one of the few texts on Arena, Peter Schjeldahl describes this autobiographic artist portrait as ‘[…] a souvenir of souvenirs, a dried garden of dried flowers. It succeeds in conjoining, for anyone willing to play along, a physical here-and-now with a mental there-and-then and even a mystical above-and-beyond, a firmament of flowing inspirations’ (1992). Whether his heroic battleground, the enshrining of his work, or a collection of clutter, Arena startles us and seduces us into seeing where we would be if we were a little less intelligent, looking at the taken-for-granted with closed eyes and not seeking literal explanations for all that we see. — Text by Caroline von Courten
All images from the series Arena— dove sarei arrivato se fossi stato intelligente! (Arena—where would I have got if I had been intelligent!), 1970–72. © Joseph Beuys/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York. The copyright of works of visual artists affiliated with a CISAC organization is regulated by Picto right in Amsterdam.© Pictoright Amsterdam 2018
Andy Kassier Success Is Just A Smile Away
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Osborne Macharia
Macicio I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapon, against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty… I felt that I could undo these evils by doing something beautiful that people r ecognize me by and thus make a whole different life for myself, which has proved to be so. — Gordon Parks A photograph is perceived as reality. While most who look at paintings, masks, or other visual arts are expected to suspend logic to give rise to the unfettered subconscious, photos are inherently perceived as snapshots of the real. We subconsciously accept these photos of daily life; someone’s life that appears to be a tad richer than our own, and we have to peel back layers of faith in our own eyeballs to believe otherwise. However, convention is not a matter of happenstance, but a result of images bought, sold, and sculpted by photo graphers, fashion directors, and editors with an inherent worldview that dictates what’s worth seeing in pixels. Black identity is so intertwined with the commodification and consumption of black images that it’s difficult even for people on the African continent and African Diaspora to draw a line between their lives and the endless images of themselves sold across the world. Are we hip hop’s platinum aspirations? Are we the Instagram model’s sculpted frame? Are we the images of gunned down, unarmed men in America? The fist pumping protesters? The kidnapped girl in the village? Are we Barack Obama? A free Janelle Monae in vagina pants? Are we the fierce runway strut of Naomi Campbell? A smiling Meghan Markle? Are we a silhouetted Afro and an Earth, Wind & Fire album cover? We are all of these things and none of these things and yet the humanity of black
the space/time continuum. Awash in African/African Diasporic sensibilities, Macharia’s work asserts that it is quite normal to be fantastic when one is simply themselves.
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people is often in a state of negotiation with the robustness of the most compelling black image, however narrow, of the day. The visual learners among us need a healthy dose of inspired visuals in our world of photos, along with a cultural framework. It is for this reason that Osborne Macharia’s photos have stoked the imaginative flames of intrigue. Macharia’s photos reveal an inner beauty externalised in wondrous spectacle in subjects which are inherently iconic. Macharia’s lens uncovers unseen worlds amongst familiar people and places, a striking space where magic and space sensibilities are as delightful and refreshing as a cool glass of artesian water. His likable subjects and their casual stances are the centrifuge for a past and future running like spiralling rivers in all directions of
I once told an audience of black students at a predominantly white ivy league college to stop ‘othering themselves.’ But how does one not live in constant comparison to the lens of others when one is bombarded with uncanny, sometimes un-relatable images, supposedly of themselves? The temptation to create images that uphold status quo narratives of black life rife in exoticism, despair, manufactured coolness or conventional success, even for people who identify as black is great and handsomely rewarded. Afrofuturist photography is another way to craft the human story and wrestle control of the lens. The fantastic elements are reminders of the ordinary as extraordinary, and the self as universal. Afrofuturist photography, to quote the iconic jazz collective the AACM is very ‘ancient to the future’. Afrofuturist photography knits the human into the cosmic now, a complex story, executed simplistically as a statement of resilience… and we are all the better for it. — Text by Ytasha L. Womack
All images from the series Macicio, 2015 © Osborne Macharia, courtesy of the artist
Tacita Dean Antigone
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Osama and his faithful lieutenant inspect an obser vation post in the Kurgan-Tyube border area, 2002
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THE DECAY OF LYING
Essay by Joan Fontcuberta
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The fake seeks to pass off false content as true, but its essential aim is not to trick or deceive: rather, it is an act of transgression, defying the power of the infor mation authorities with the strength of scepticism and criticism.
The Decay of Lying is the title Oscar Wilde gave to a short essay in the manner of a Socratic dialogue, in which one of his characters, Vivian, makes a hierarchical distinction between good and bad liars, the former being artists and the latter politicians. It follows then, that there are different classes of lie, the most refined being those embroidered in order to make the world a more astonishing place. For Wilde, when the elabora tions of human ingenuity succeed in liberating them selves from the bonds of reality, they are no longer a mere reflection of life, of nature, but become its model. This idea can be seen as prefiguring, in essence, the fake news of today. Making up stories and pretending that the facts fit the invention — as advocated by newspaper owners and editors not unduly encumbered with scruples, ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.’ 1 It has also, since time immemorial, been a favourite resource of fortune-tellers and prophets. In an age of post-truth, fake news and alternative facts, ‘verofiction’ (fiction posing as fact) is an especially relevant strategic resource, both in artistic creation and in political activism. The aim of this particular campaign is to get everyone to agree that there is no truth other than what is useful here and now.2 Verofictive practices (producing what we usually call ‘fakes’) are language-based techniques which employ the artifices of appearance to infiltrate par ticular contexts and operate provisionally inside them without revealing their actual identity or their ultimate objective. In short, a verofiction is a fiction that hides its illusory condition and is received and regarded as genuine and real until it is unmasked. Let me elucidate the claim with a case study. In 2004 the cultural supplement of the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia invited me to create a special piece of work for its centre pages, and it occurred to me that it would be particularly apt to insinuate into an information medium a project that specifically questioned the role
of photography in journalism. Thus was born Decon structing Osama, a fictional narrative — a storytelling — centred on an (invented) Arabic news agency called Al Zur (‘the light’). The thread of the fiction went on to recount how two Al Zur reporters, Mohammed Ben Kalish Ezab and Omar Ben Salaad (names borrowed from characters in Tintin in the Land of Black Gold), had pulled off one of the most remarkable scoops in the history of investigative journalism. Ben Kalish and Ben Salaad had been tracing the movements over the previous few years of Dr. FasqiytaUl Junat, one of the leaders of al-Qaeda’s military operations. The two photojournalists dedicated several months to shedding some light on the murky activities of this slippery character who had been outwitting the intelligence services of so many countries for so long. The real bombshell was their discovery that the gentle man’s true name was Manbaa Mokfhi and that he was in fact a singer and actor who had appeared in B-movies and TV soaps in various Arab-speaking countries. He had starred in the 1971 romcom The Smile of Scheherazade and been the poster boy of the Mecca-Cola ad cam paigns in Algeria and Morocco. Unmasked, Manbaa Mokfhi confessed to having been hired to play the part of the terrorist mastermind and arch-villain during the orchestrated operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. It never became clear if the scam had been set up by the media or by an intelligence agency. Mokfhi then dis appeared. He was presumably being moved from one secret hide-out to another; in any case, every effort to track him down proved fruitless, which only served to intensify the aura of mystery enveloping him. Suitably costumed and made-up, at times with an exaggeratedly caricaturish tone, I embodied the charac ter of Manbaa Mokfhi (which is Arabic for ‘covered fountain’ or Fontcuberta, my surname in Catalan). The archivists at La Vanguardia and some of my photo journalist friends had supplied me with unused nega tives from genuine assignments in the Middle East, and
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Endnote these provided me with the settings into which, by means of Photoshop, I inserted myself as an ostensible jihadist. The resulting montages turned out to be emi nently convincing, and thanks to their circulation on the Internet some of these images found their way into the repositories of bin Laden iconography, thereby contaminating them and in many cases causing the original to be confused with the manipulated copy. This contamination was a clear warning of the fragility of any document and the need to scutinise the criteria for the verification of any story. As we have said, the fake seeks to pass off false content as true, but its essential aim is not to trick or deceive: rather, it is an act of trans gression, defying the power of the information authori ties with the strength of scepticism and criticism.
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Manbaa Mokfhi was the face in the international campaign advertising Mecca Cola, 1986 On manoeuvres with the mujahideen insurgency in Afghanistan, 2000
The first requisite for ensuring the effectiveness of a fake is to choose a credible storyline likely to chime with certain widely held opinions and trigger the pre judices and expectations of the public. The bin Laden case amply satisfied these conditions. All but unknown before the attacks of September 11, his picture became instantly ubiquitous in a frenetic media blitz that made him the living incarnation of ‘Evil’, the visible face of ‘Global Terror’ and the scapegoat lumbered with respon sibility for all the fears of the West. With the passing away of communism, a new threat had to be invented, and Islam was the ideal candidate. Now, the precepts of mass psychosociology dictate that an immediately
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identifiable image or ‘brand’ must be established, so the enemy had to be given a face, and the spectacle industry duly came up with Osama bin Laden, the archetypal movie villain, customised in accordance with the rules of the negative star system. To crank up tension during the shooting of the blockbuster, the baddie would have to play a drawn-out game of cat and mouse with the hero of the film, Uncle Sam, in which he would be allowed to land a few treacherously punishing blows before being utterly defeated in the obligatory happy ending. Rather than a real flesh-and-blood individual, bin Laden was a Hollywood product. But after a while the novelty wore off, and the public’s attention and interest waned. Bin Laden had ceased to be hot property on the infotainment market and with falling ratings he had to be taken off the air to make way for new faces. The suggestion that bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders (such as my own Dr. Fasqiyta-Ul Junat) might be players recruited by the agencies that run virtual politics has a logic that makes it more plausible than preposterous. For many people, global terrorism is simply a structural requirement of post-capitalism. The time came when it was decided to remove bin Laden from the scene — having outlived his usefulness — and to take advantage of his exit for a cathartic grand finale. To achieve the desired coup d’effet, Barack Obama’s propaganda team crafted Operation Neptune Spear, a spectacularly orchestrated hunt for Public Enemy No. 1 — a piece of business that Obama’s pre decessor George W. Bush had left unfinished. For a very considerable time there was really only a single image of this operation: the one made by Pete Souza, the official White House photographer, on May 1, 2011. The shot shows President Obama with his national security team in the so-called Situation Room of the White House: 13 (or 14) men and 2 women watching with serious, even tense expressions the live video feed of the actions of a team of Navy SEALs on their mission to liquidate the leader of Al-Qaeda. As expected, given the significance of the events it illustrated, Souza’s photograph received a huge amount of attention. It is, for a start, interesting that in the image age, initially just one photograph of such a pivotal moment should have circulated. It is, of course, a carefully selected photograph, whose function is to condense the associations suggested by an event and weld them to a particular visual representation. It is also a ‘stopper’ image because it performs the function of stemming the possible seepage of alternative images that might deflect, distort or contradict the message to be trans mitted. It is true that the White House could simply have decided not to release any image, but devoid of graphic testimony, the story would have lost much of its epic quality in the minds of the public.3 What we have here is not so much censorship as an exercise in control; control of the image, which is intended to be taken as evidence of another form of control, that of reality.
↑↑ President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. Seated, from left, are: Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Standing, from left, are: Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; National Security Advisor Tom Donilon; Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Manbaa Mokfhi, actor and Head of the MEIOA (Middle East Infiltration Operations Agency); Tony Binken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; Audrey Tomason Director for Counterterrorism; John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Home land Security and Counterterrorism; and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Please note: a classi fied document seen in this photo graph has been obscured. (Original version of the White House Situation Room photo before removing Manbaa Mokfhi, as it appeared in the official circulated version). ↑ The Situation Room, 2011 © Pete Souza
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Controlling the image is tantamount to controlling the situation. Because what Pete Souza’s photograph is telling us, with the authoritative voice of Big Brother, is that ‘the American people can sleep peacefully, because everything is under control’. In short, this is a mise en scène designed to convey to the citizens a message of trust and confidence from their most senior public servants (politicians, officials, chiefs of staff). Servants that decide, on the basis of an abstract idea of the common good, what can and can not be seen. An ecstasy of poetic justice had ended up providing the coda to the Deconstructing Osama project. Over the years quite a number of details of Operation Neptune Spear have been leaked, showing that the supposedly daring raid was nothing but a neatly articulated drama tisation. For the veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and journalist Seymour Hersh, acclaimed for exposing the cover-up of the My Lai massacre of unarmed civilians by the US during the Vietnam War, the story of the bin Laden operation was actually a great big lie. In other words: the whole thing was a fake. It seems that the seriously ill terrorist leader was already in the custody of Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency, and being held in a compound in Abbottabad, unprotected and cut off from the rest of the world. Contradicting the official versions trumpeted by the press, Hersh main tains that neither the CIA nor any other US agency played any significant part in discovering bin Laden’s hiding place. There never was any confession obtained from a prisoner by means of torture that made it possible to track down the founder of Al-Qaeda (a claim repeat edly used to justify the use of torture in interrogations). A Pakistani officer simply revealed his location in exchange for a very large reward. There was no firefight in the house where bin Laden took refuge; the SEALs encountered no resistance, and the operation involved no heroic deeds. And, to crown it all, the terrorist’s body was not dropped into the Indian Ocean off the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson as a symbolic act leaving the supremely evil monster with no discoverable grave; the close-range fire from several automatic weapons ripped bin Laden’s body to shreds, in the finest gore movie fashion. In the end, the story turns out to be much less glamorous than the official version. It is in any case instructive to denounce the political practice of moulding facts in the interests of the teller, so characteristic of post-truth, and at the same time to champion an artistic practice as a prescient anticipation of reality, and give Oscar Wilde something to rejoice over in his grave.
1 This axiom is sometimes attributed to US media mogul William Randolph Hearst (it may or may not have been coined by Mark Twain). These days the management of the story is no longer the exclusive preserve of newspaper editors and ruling elites, but extends from PR and press offices to grassroots spokespersons, from police report to the summings-up of magistrates, from talk-show guests and pundits to ‘influencers’, all of whom enjoy a measure of authority and privilege in the exercise of discourse, and all of whom eagerly pursue their own headlines and prominence. 2 My attempt at defining post-truth is indebted to Jorge Luis Marzo’s La competencia de lo falso. Una historia del fake (Editorial Cátedra, Madrid, 2018). 3 The myth-making began almost at once: Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow started filming Zero Dark Thirty a few months later.
Biographies MARIAMA ATTAH (b. 1985, UK) is a photography curator and editor. With a BA in Photography and MA in Museum Studies, her interest in photography is centred on its ability to re-present visual culture and history alongside the over looked and the under explored. Before joining the editorial department of Foam Magazine, she was Programme Curator at Photoworks responsible for developing and programming exhibitions and events, including Brighton Photo Biennial and Jer wood/Photoworks Awards. She was also Commissioning and Managing Editor of Photoworks Annual maga zine. She has worked with a number of national and international artists and previous work roles include Assistant Curator at Compton Verney, Exhibitions and Events Manager at Iniva, and Assistant Officer, Visual Arts at Arts Council England. TACO HIDDE BAKKER (b. 1978, NL) is a writer, translator, and researcher whose work reflects on many topics, as seen through the prisms of photo graphy, (documentary) film and the visual arts. His essays, reviews and other writings are to be found in various artist’s books and in inter national magazines as Camera Austria International (AT), EXTRA (BE), The PhotoBook Review (US), and British Journal of Photography (UK). The Photograph That Took the Place of a Mountain, his first essay collection was published by Fw:Books in summer 2018. DAVID BATE is an artist, professor and writer whose focus orbits around the notions of otherness, subjectivity and critical theories of photography. He is Professor of Photography at the Media, Art and Design Campus at University of Westminster (London) and director of the Photography Research Group. Bate is also cofounder and co-editor of the inter national photography academic journal Photographies. He has published many essays and books, including Zone (2012) Art Photo graphy (2015), Photography Key Concepts (2016) and Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent (2004). He is co-founder of the artist collective galleries Accident and Five Years in London. His photographic work is exhibited internationally in galleries and museums. FILIP BERENDT (b. 1975, PL) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, and at the Royal Academy of Arts, London where he received a postgraduate diploma in Sculpture. His education, in between photography and sculp ture, has led him to a specific working process starting from three-dimen sional objects and ending with twodimensional photographs. His sculp tures are themselves materially fragmented as Berendt makes use of various found materials (metal, food, mould etc). After photographing
them, he destroys the original sculp tures. His nearly abstract images have been exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions as well as international fairs such as Photo London 2018. JOSEPH BEUYS (1921-1986, DE) is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the twentieth century. His exten sive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his ‘extended definition of art’ and the idea of social sculpture as a Gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. The large range of highly symbolic mediums such as felt, fat or honey, is closely connected to his almost shamanic practice, which has been widely expressed in the field of per formance and in pedagogic actions. By his unique artistic practice, Joseph Beuys has initiated numerous fascinating debates that are still relevant today. PERSIJN BROERSEN & MARGIT LUKÁCS (b. 1974, NL & b. 1973, NL) are artists living and working in Amsterdam. In their films, animations, graphic work and installations, ‘nature’ functions as a mirror for our media-dictated culture, in which fact and fiction are closely inter twined. Their work has been shown in, among others Stedelijk Museum (NL), Kröller Muller Museum (NL), Biennale of Sydney (AU), Karachi Biennale (PK) and Centre Pompidou Paris (FR). This autumn, their work will be shown in a solo exhibition at FOAM, Amsterdam. Their films have been shown at festivals including LAForum, Kassel Dokumentar und Filmfestival, Paris Rencontres, New York Film Festival, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. MARINE CABOS (b. 1986, FR) is an art historian who specialises in the history of photography in China. She received her PhD in the history of art from the University of London (SOAS). She has published several papers on the art and history of modern and contemporary China and has lec tured at SOAS, Christie’s Education, the EHESS, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. She has worked in major cultural institutions in Shanghai, Paris, and London. In 2011, she launched, and continues to admin ister photographyofchina.com, an associative platform whose goal is to present photographic material related to China. She is currently Research Associate at SOAS and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). NICOLA LO CALZO (b. 1979, IT) studied landscape architecture before quickly shifting to photography. His work researches questions of identity and environment with a deep focus
on (de)colonial surroundings, minority groups, and their strategies of sur vival and resistance. His longest pro ject to date is a seven-year project entitled Cham on the memories of the slave trade and slavery photo graphed in Africa, the Caribbean and America. Lo Calzo’s work has been exhibited at the Macaal, Marrakesh, the Afriques Capitales, Lille, the Musée des Confluences, Lyon, the National Alinari Museum of Photo graphy, Florence, the ropenmuseum, Amsterdam, and is part of many private and public collections. He has published three books and is also a regular contributor to the international press including Le Monde, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Corriere della Sera. He lives and works between Paris, West Africa and Caribbean. Regla is part of a long term project, Cham. The book Regla was published in 2017 by Kehrer Verlag (En/Es) and Andrè Frére (Fr/Es). DAVID CAMPANY (b. 1967, UK) is a writer, curator, and artist. His recent publications include So Present, so Invisible — Conversations on Photo graphy (2018), The Open road: pho tography and the American Road Trip (2014), and Walker Evans: the maga zine work (2014). Campany curated the exhibition A Handful of Dust — from the Cosmic to the Domestic — including a work by Tereza Zelenkova. He teaches at the University of Westminster. ILIANA CEPERO is an art historian, art critic, and curator who received a PhD Art History from Stanford University. Cepero is a Visiting Professor at the New School and teaches courses on Latin American art and visual culture; modern and contemporary Art History and Visual Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript about post-war Argentinean art and photography under Peronismo. As part of her curatorial practice, she organised the exhibition Cuba Is at the Annenberg Space for Photo graphy in Los Angeles as part of the Getty Foundation’s initiative Pacific Standard LA/LA (Sept 2017-March 2018); ¡Cuba, Cuba! 65 years of Photography, sponsored by the International Center of Photography at the Southampton Arts Center, Long Island, NY (August 2015); she was also Assistant Curator of the Montreal Biennial in 2007, and co-curated the exhibition Cuba: Art and History. From 1868 to today held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2008. JÖRG COLBERG (b. 1968, DE) is a writer, critic, and photographer. As a faculty member of the Hartford Art School’s International LimitedResidency Photography MFA Program, he has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Hartford since 2012. In addition to writing about photography on his website Conscientious Photography Maga zine, Jörg has written essays for
271 magazines online and in print including the British Journal of Photography, Foam Magazine, and Creative Review. CAROLINE VON COURTEN (b. 1983, DE) works around the image/frame of photography. This is achieved through researching for her PhD dissertation on theoretical and material connotations of the photo graphic surface, or by curating exhibitions on paper (Foam Maga zine) or in physical spaces (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Nederlands Fotomuseum, Goethe Institute & the Dutch Culture Center Shanghai). With a background in Visual Culture Studies (University of Utrecht & Monash University, Melbourne) and a Master’s degree in Photographic Studies (Leiden University) she followed her obsession for a medium reflective of understanding anything that shapes our visual surroundings. DOMINIK CZECHOWSKI is a Londonbased curator and writer. He has held curatorial positions at Arnolfini Gallery; Hayward Gallery; Calvert 22 Foundation; Barbican and has curated exhibitions, performances and contextual events for institutions such as the Freud Museum and Liverpool Biennial. He has developed projects with a wide range of artists such as Laurie Anderson, Wojciech Bąkowski, Tim Etchells, Sheila Hicks, Robert Kuśmirowski, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler, Tai Shani, Sława Harasymowicz, Sun Xun, amongst many others. He is an editor of and contributor to artist publications and exhibition catalogues as well as magazines such as MAP and Art Monthly. TACITA DEAN (b. 1965, UK) studied at Falmouth School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art before moving to live and work in Berlin in 2000. Her solo exhibitions include Tate Britain, London (2001), Schaulager, Basel (2006), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), Nicola Trussardi Foundation, Milan (2009) and MUMOK, Vienna (2011), New Museum, New York (2012), Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro (2013), Fondación Botín, Santander (2013) and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2016). In 2018, Dean presented LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT, STILL LIFE, three distinct exhibitions which formed an unprecedented collabo ration with the National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery and The Royal Academy of Arts in London. Dean was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998, and was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006 and the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009. In 2011, she made FILM as part of the Unilever Series of commissions in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, which marked the beginning of her campaign to protect the medium of photo chemical film (savefilm.org). Other recent group exhibitions include dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), Venice Biennale (2013), Berlin Biennale and
272 Biennale of Sydney (2014). In 2014/15 she was artist in residence at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. MARK ALICE DURANT (b. 1955, US) is an artist and writer living in Baltimore. His essays have appeared in numerous journals such as Art in America, Aperture, Art Journal, Dear Dave, and Photograph. He is author of 27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography. He co-curated and co-authored of Blur of the Other worldly: Contemporary Art, Tech nology and the Paranormal. As an artist, Durant is mostly known for the performance duo ‘men of the world’, which he co-founded in 1991 and, for 10 years, performed on the streets of Chicago, Toronto, Seattle, New York, Houston, San Francisco, and other cities. He has served on the faculties of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA, and Syracuse University, and is now a professor at the University of Mary land. In 2011, he started the website Saint-Lucy.com which is devoted to writing about photography and contemporary art. In 2017, Durant founded Saint Lucy Books. JOAN FONTCUBERTA (b. 1955, Barcelona) is a conceptual artist, writer, teacher and curator. He grew up in Franco’s dictatorship, which fostered a critical approach towards authority and propaganda in his work. His background in communi cations and advertisement led him to develop artistic and theoretical activity focusing on truthfulness, knowledge, mockumentary and trompe-l’œil. He has had solo exhi bitions at MoMA, Chicago Art Insti tute, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, Science Museum, London, and many others. He has authored a dozen books on aspects of history, aesthetics and the epistemology of photography, the most recent The Fury of Images. Notes on Postphotography, 2016. Fontcuberta was the 2013 recipient of the Hasselblad Foundation International Award. MARTIN GUSINDE (1886-1969, AT) was an Austrian priest and ethnolo gist mostly known for his anthropo logical work, particularly on the native groups of Tierra del Fuego. After his ordination in 1911, Gusinde worked as a teacher in Chile and subsequently at the Ethnographic Museum in Santiago de Chile for a decade. It was during his time there that Gusinde undertook four different journeys to Tierra del Fuego, where he photographed the indigenous peoples and recorded their songs and chants on behalf of the Berlin Phonogram Archive. These are the only audio recordings of the Tierra del Fuegan Indians still existing. In 1926 Gusinde came back to Europe to graduate with a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Vienna, where he edited the first and only Yamana-English dictionary.
Biographies Gusinde travelled afterwards for research to Congo and New Guinea. The Martin Gusinde Anthropological Museum in Puerto Williams (CL) was created upon his death honouring his work with the Tierra del Fuego Indians. HE BO (b. 1989, CN) studied at Nanchang University, the University of Paris 8, and Beijing Film Academy. His work focuses on found imagery and the subject of disaster, and approaches ideas of the narrative relationship between images and text, communication barriers in the context of disaster, and the fictive nature of archives and memories. He Bo’s work has been shown at many international festivals and exhibitions including the 2016 Jimei × Arles International Photo Festival in Fujian, the 17th China Pingyao International Photography Festival in 2017, the Lianzhou Foto Festival 2017 and as part of the 2017 Allegory: The 9th Three Shadows Photography Exhibi tion in Beijing, where he lives and works. LOUIS KAPLAN (b. 1960) is Professor of History and Theory of Photography and New Media at the University of Toronto, with a focus on spirit photo graphy, photography and community and photographic humour. His book publications in the field of photo graphy studies include American Exposures: Photography and Com munity in the Twentieth Century (Minnesota, 2005), The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photo grapher (Minnesota, 2008), and most recently. Photography and Humour (Reaktion, 2016). His interest in the role of humour in art and culture dates back to his first co-authored book on the animated cartoon and pop cultural icon Gumby The Au thorized Biography of the World’s Favorite Clayboy (Harmony, 1986). He also wrote the commissioned entry on the subject of Humour in Art for the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2nd edition, 2014). ANDY KASSIER (b. 1989, DE) is a conceptual visual artist addressing the topics of wealth, success and their (self-) representation in our contemporary society through the use of self-portraits, sculptures and installations. He critically depicts contemporary trends such as selfbranding, the world of ‘influencers’ and the depiction of richness and happiness, on social media. Kassier studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, and now lives and works in Berlin. He has participated in various group and solo exhibitions and was recently shortlisted and part of the exhibition Selfie to SelfExpression at Saatchi Gallery, London. KIM KNOPPERS (b. 1976, NL) is an art historian (University of Amsterdam), and curator at Foam. Since 2011, she has worked on solo exhibitions, including those by Melanie Bonajo,
Broomberg & Chanarin, JH Engström, Anne de Vries and Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs and group exhibitions, most recently Collectivism. Collec tives and Their Quest for Value (2016) and Back to the Future. The 19th Century in the 21st Century (2018). She has contributed to various magazines including Foam Magazine, Unseen and Aperture and has written catalogue texts for Jaya Pelupessy and Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques, amongst others. She is also a lecturer on the MA Photography at ECAL in Lausanne where she initiated and developed the course Do Not Disturb — Curating in Progress. MIRJAM KOOIMAN (b. 1990, NL) is a curator at Foam, where she has worked on various shows including Ai Weiwei — Safe Passage, Daisuke Yokota — Matter as well as the Foam Talent exhibitions of 2015 and 2016. Kooiman is also curating the Broersen & Lukács exhibition. She holds a BA in Art History and MA in Curating from the University of Amsterdam, with a special interest in postcolonial approaches in the arts. She is currently researching the topic of photography related to digital and virtual realities, and is particularly interested in the human perception of nature in the Anthropocene. Mirjam previously served as a curator-in-training at the photo graphy collection of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. OSBORNE MACHARIA (b. 1986, KE) is a self-taught commercial and advertising photographer. He himself places his work within the genre of Afrofuturism with a focus on culture, fiction and identity. His work has most recently been exhibited within Black to the future (Dubai), at the Bamako Encounters 2017, the Lagos Foto Festival 2017 and 2016 and at Foam in 2017. He won Kenya’s first ever Cannes Lion in 2015 and Kenya’s first Jury member at Cannes Lion and ADC in 2018. His work has been shown on CNN, BBC, Huffington Post, Afro Punk, Elle Magazine. As a com mercial photographer, Osborne Macharia has worked with inter national brands including Marvel/ Disney, Oprah Winfrey Network, Coke, Absolut Vodka, MTV Base, Volkswagen and Kenya Airways. Macharia also runs an outdoor lighting workshop series called Lightfreaks, which focuses on developing light ing knowledge and a unique photo graphic style to a new generation of professional photographers. MAGALI NACHTERGAEL (b. 1978, BE) is an editor, art critic and curator. She is a lecturer in French literature, contemporary arts and culture at the University of Paris 13. She has pub lished her intensive research on Roland Barthes and the individual mythology in relation to photography under the title Mythologies individu elles, récit de soi et photographie au 20e siècle, as well in 2015 Roland Barthes contemporain. She recently
curated the exhibition The Family of the Invisibles at the Seoul Museum of Art in 2016. Nachtergael is one of the winners of the 2018 curatorial scholarships of the Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles. ORPHEUS STANDING ALONE is a small, independent French publishing house founded by the sisters Camille L. and Anna L., whose books present photography, writing, and collages gather and offer an introspective, contemplative views on their work. The publishing house’s most recent publications include Menq Enq Mer Sarere and Orpheus Standing Alone #1, a dialogue between a photographic diary and a collection of reflective free verse poetry. CHRISTIANE PESCHEK (b. 1984, AT) is a photographer whose work process is guided by the failure of the perfect photographic picture and the explo ration of visual reality. Partly biogra phical, partly as an observer from the outside she searches for the codes and roles of intimacy. She experi ments with material of her personal photographic archive searching for additional values of photography and how they relate to our physical and emotional memory. Peschek holds a degree both from the Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Applied Arts, in Vienna. Her works have been shown in several solo and group exhibitions around Europe. Her latest shows include Salzburger Kunstverein, Fotogalerie Wien, FOTOHOF Salzburg, Museum of Applied Arts Vienna as well as exhi bitions at several festivals such as Athens Photofestival, PhotoIreland and the Triennale of Photography Hamburg. She is based in Vienna and represented by SCAG Contemporary. IGOR SAMOLET (b. 1984, RU) is a photographer whose work focuses on human relationships, from the mundane and public to extreme and private aspects. Samolet graduated in 2013 from the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multi media and in the same year published his first book be happy! which was awarded with a silver medal at German Photobook Award 2014, and included by Martin Parr in the anthology of the world’s photobooks. He was chosen as one of the 25 photographers who have changed the opinion about Russia by The Calvert Journal. His work has been exhibited at various solo and group exhibitions, and festivals including Riga Photomonth 2016, Tbilisi Photo Festival 2016, X Moscow International Biennale Fashion and Style in Photo graphy, 2017 and Circulation(s) 2018 in Paris and Athens Photo Festival 2018. He was shortlisted twice for the Voies OFF Arles (2015, 2016). SCARFOLK is a fictional northern English town created by writer and designer Richard Littler, who at times is characterised as the town mayor. The fictional town is set in the 1970s
Biographies and satirises both that decade and modern day. Scarfolk started as a blog which publishes artefacts from the town council’s archive including ads, TV programme shots, household products, public information flyers and booklets, out-of-print books, etc. Key topics addressed by the project are totalitarianism, suburban life, occultism & religion, school & childhood, as well as antisocial be haviour such as racism and sexism. The blog quickly became popular and received positive reactions from the public and media in the UK, as well as internationally. GQ Magazine called it one of ‘The 100 Funniest Things in the History of the Internet’. Richard Littler has been interviewed in many publications and reviews of Scarfolk appeared in The Independent, The Telegraph, Stylenoir, Creative Review and widely read websites such as Boing Boing and Dangerous Minds. Scarfolk was adapted into a book called Discover ing Scarfolk (Ebury Press, 2014) and a second Scarfolk book is due for publication. SHARON SLIWINSKI (b. 1975) is Pro fessor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University in Canada. Her research ranges from the intersection of politics and aesthetics to human rights discourse, psychoanalysis and the terrain of the imaginary with a common thread the inclusion of the topic of photography. Her first book, Human Rights In Camera (2011) researched the visual politics of human rights. She has widely contri buted to the field of photography studies and recently co-edited Photography and the Optical Uncon scious (2017). Sliwinski’s most recent work investigates the social, political, and cultural significance of dreamlife with a book entitled Dreaming Dark Times (2017) and is creator and editor of The Museum of Dreams. KATRINA SLUIS (b. 1978, NZ) is a curator, writer and media educator, founding Co-Director of the Centre of the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University and Curator (Digital Programme) at The Photographers’ Gallery. With a back ground in systems administration and early internet technologies, her research is broadly engaged with photography’s relationship to com putation, its social circulation and cultural value. Her writing has been featured in journals including Photo graphies, Philosophy of Photography, Aperture and Art in America. Recent exhibition projects include James Bridle: Seamless Transitions (2015) and For the LOL of Cats: Felines, Photography and the Web (2012) and the platform www.Unthinking. Photography (2016). DAVID SOLO (b. 1960, US) is a Brooklyn based collector of photo graphy, contemporary Japanese and Chinese art, and especially, artist and
photobooks. He is actively involved with a number of institutions in London and New York as well as individual photobook research and publishing projects. Solo is also a frequent visitor to and participant in a wide range of book fairs, festivals and related events. DREW THOMPSON (b. 1982, US) is a writer and visual historian, who teaches at Bard College as Assistant Professor of Africana and Historical Studies. Thompson studied art history and history at Williams College, and holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota in African History. As an author and editor, he has published on African and African-American contemporary art and the history of photography in Southern Africa. He is completing a book provisionally titled Filtering History: Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times, and is at work on another project that explores the use of Polaroid cameras and films in Africa and the Diaspora. DARIA TUMINAS (b. 1984, RU) is a researcher, photographer and curator based in Amsterdam. She obtained an MA in Film and Photographic Studies at Leiden University. She was the guest editor of The Photobook Review #12 published by Aperture in spring 2017. The issue focused on the relations between cinema and photobooks connected to a public event she co-curated at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In 2018, Tuminas contributed a chapter on East European photographers to the project and book How We See: Photobooks by Women initiated by 10×10 Photobooks. Currently, Tuminas works as the head of Unseen Book Market at Unseen Amsterdam. JEFF WALL (b. 1946, CA) has exhibited his photographs internationally for the past 35 years. His pictures, in both black and white and colour, are usually large in scale and done in collaboration with performers. He calls them ‘cinematographic’. He is considered to be one of the artists who has led the way in emphasising the affinities between photography, painting, and cinema. His critical writing has been collected and pub lished in several languages. He has been awarded several prizes, includ ing the Hasselblad Award for photo graphy in 2002 and the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in 2003. Wall’s solo shows include Schaulager, Basel (2005) and Tate Modern, London (2005/06), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007), Staatliche Kunst sammlungen, Dresden (2010), Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels (2011), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2013) and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2013), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2014), Kunst haus Bregenz (2014/15) and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2015), Kunsthalle Mannheim (2018). Wall also participated in documentas 7, 8, 10 and 11 at Kassel.
PATRICK WILLOCQ (b. 1969, FR) is a French photographer who grew up in Congo. It was a return trip to Congo in 2009 that made him devote him self fully to photography. Willocq’s work is characterised by imagination, the art of metamorphosing reality, and a practice which aligns aesthetics and ethics with the subjects being entirely part of his creative process. His artistic practice can be read as a hybrid between ethnology, sociology, performance, installation, video and photography, and described as par ticipatory theatricality with carefully composed performative stagings entirely constructed in situ. His work is represented by Project 2.0/Gallery in The Hague. He has been nominated, finalist or winner of various inter national awards including SFR Paris Photo 2012, Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2014, Discovery Award Rencontres d’Arles 2014, Sony World Photo Awards 2016, Prix Coup de Coeur HSBC for Photography 2016, and has been published by among others CNN, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Paris Match, Stern and the British Journal of Photography. YTASHA L. WOMACK (b. US) is an author, filmmaker, dancer, a 2014 Locus Awards Non Fiction Finalist and independent scholar whose work specialises in Afrofuturism. She received a BA in Mass Media Arts from Clark Atlanta University and studied Arts, Media, and Entertain ment Management at Columbia College Chicago. Her book Afro futurism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture (2013) is key reading on the subject bridging science fiction, futurisms, and culture. Other recent publications include Rayla 2213 (2016), Post Black: How a New Generation is Refining African American Identity (2010) and Beats, Rhymes and Life: What We Love & Hate About Hip Hop (2007). Womack is currently working on other Afro futurist films including Bar Star City. Womack directed Afrofuturist Dance short film A Love Letter to the Ances tors From Chicago (2017), winner of Best Experimental Film at Collected Voices Festival. Womack also leads youth dance programs as well as an Afrofuturism dance therapy program for teenagers and adults. TEREZA ZELENKOVA (b. 1985, CZ) is an artist working mainly with black and white analogue photography. Her practice often deals with mysti cism, ranging from abstract ideas about death and the sacred, to docu menting concrete locations tied to local mythologies or mysterious historical events. She holds a BA (Hons) in Photographic Arts from the University of Westminster (2010) and obtained her MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, London in 2012. She has several self-published books, including Supreme Vice pub lished by Mörel Books (2011). Her most recent exhibitions include the Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Le Bal,
273 Paris and Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne. Her work is in collections of Saatchi Gallery, London, the V&A Museum, London and Museum Winterthur, Switzerland. Zelenkova lives and works in London.
274 CHRISTIANE PESCHEK The Fear Theories — Obolus nr. 1, found 2009 in Iceland, demonstration 2016 — Moment nr. 78/2012, remembered 2015, never shown — Untitled moment, 2012, Salzburg, constantly changing memory — Reflection nr. 4 on memory nr. 7001, constantly transformed — Situation on the beach II, 2016, archived — Untitled, transformation on printed photograph, 2016 — Untitled memory, 2016, archived — Traces of attack nr. 299, scanned and remembered 2016 — Untitled memory, 2015, archived — Untitled memory, 2016, recently remembered, archived — Transformation of reconstructed dream, 2017 — Observation of sleep, 2013, remembered and transformed 2016 — Interpretation of attack nr. 77, 2010, scanned and remembered in 2016 — Untitled transformation, ref. memory nr. 9.440, recently shown JOSEPH BEUYS Arena — Dove sarei arrivato se fossi stato intelligente! In order of appearance: — #13 (Verona arena) — #45 a I attempt to set (make) you free 1969 b 24 Hours: and in us . . . under us . . . landunder 1965 c 24 Hours: and in us . . . under us . . . landunder 1965 d EURASIAN STAFF 82 min fluxorum organum 1968 — #88 a 24 Hours: and in us . . . under us . . . landunder 1965 b ELEMENT 1 and parts of ELEMENT 2 (complete with highvoltage alternating current) [six parts] 1966 (positioned by Beuys for the camera, Drakeplatz 4 Düsseldorf) c Radio 1961 d 24 Hours: and in us . . . under us . . . landunder 1965 e 24 Hours: and in us . . . under us . . . landunder 1965 f ROOM 563 x 491 x 563 with Fat Corners and Dismantled Air Pumps 1968 g ROOM 563 x 491 x 563 with Fat Corners and Dismantled Air Pumps 1968 h ROOM 563 x 491 x 563 with Fat Corners and Dismantled Air Pumps 1968 — #18 a Titus/Iphigenie 1969 b Action Sculpture 1963 — #47 a Transsiberian Train 1961 b (Dried Cod) 1957 c From: The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated 1964 d Mountain King (Tunnel) 2 Planets 1958–1961
Extended Creditlines e Thunderstorm 1957 BEUYS 1962 Bees (Giocondology) 1963 (close-up, Vitrine 1950–1967, “Block Beuys”) f Bees (Giocondology) 1963 2 Loaves of Bread 1966 Fat Sculpture (transposed) Wax 1964 Electrode (Fat-Felt) 1963 (close-up, Vitrine 1950–1067), “Block Beuys”) — #20 a EURASIA SIBERIAN SYMPHONY 1963 32nd COMPOSITION (EURASIA) FLUXUS 1966 → b :>>HAUPTSTROM>> FLUXUS 1967 c Titus/Iphigenie 1969 — #80 a Virgin 1961 b Camera 1963 c I want to see my mountains 1971 Voglio vedere i miei montagne d I want to see my mountains 1971 e I want to see my mountains 1971
Scarfolk
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CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS & ARTISTS Filip Berendt, Joseph Beuys, He Bo, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács, Tacita Dean, Martin Gusinde, Andy Kassier, Nicola Lo Calzo, Osborne Macharia, Orpheus Standing Alone, Christiane Peschek, Igor Samolet, Scarfolk, Jeff Wall, Patrick Willocq, Tereza Zelenkova FRONT COVER Untitled Moment, 2014, Iceland, constantly changing memory, from the series The Fear Theories, 2007-2017 © Christiane Peschek, courtesy of the artist. BACK COVER Graphic rituals called Anaforuana in the temple Erume Efó, Guanabacoa, Cuba from the series Regla, 2017, part of the project Cham © Nicola Lo Calzo, courtesy of the artist INSIDE BACK COVER Untitled from the series Monomyth, 2018 © Filip Berendt, courtesy of the artist INSIDE BACK COVER SPREAD Untitled, from the series Menq Enq Mer Sarere, 2015 © Orpheus Standing Alone, courtesy of the publishing house
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