#46 / 2017
international photography magazine
featuring: Izumi Miyazaki Amak Mahmoodian Namsa Leuba Dana Lixenberg Jon Rafman Hiroshi Okamoto Claude Cahun/ Marcel Moore Laurie Simmons
BP
22,50
WHO WE ARE
WhO WE ARE WHO WE ARE WHO WE ARE WHO WE ARE WhO WE ARE WHO WE ARE WhO WE ARE WHO WE ARE WhO WE ARE WHO WE ARE
Features
Contents
4 What’s new?
Salvi DanĂŠs, Charlie Rubin, Laura El-Tantawy, Michael Lundgren and Anouk Kruithof
9 Self Portrait
16 Snapshots
22 Interview
18 Toolbox
29 Unexpected Marriages
Matthew Leifheit, Christian Patterson
#Dysturb
Mayumi Hosokura
Bruno Ceschel
Ari Marcopoulos & Gucci
Who We Are 34 Portfolio Overview
111 Dana Lixenberg
155 Jon Rafman
36 Scattered Mirrors
131 A Second Life
175 Hiroshi Okamoto
51 Izumi Miyazaki
139 Scanning the Self
195 Claude Cahun/ Marcel Moore
by Marcel Feil
Kowai Kawaii
71 Amak Mahmoodian Shenasnameh
91 Namsa Leuba ISIGQI
Imperial Courts
by Mirjam Kooiman
by Hinde Haest
147 Excavating Identity by Kim Knoppers
Still Life (Betamale)
Recruit
Untitled
215 Laurie Simmons Kigurumi, Dollers
by Marloes Krijnen Editor-in-chief
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Editorial Who are you? At first glance, it appears to be a straightforward question, and one that – in most instances – we are conditioned to answer simply: by providing our name. It’s generally the response expected of us. Yet, upon reflection, it begins to feel like such an arbitrary distinction. Why is it that, when asked a question of such central importance to our identity, we reply thoughtlessly, with what is little more than a label? A mere grouping of letters, strung together by our parents and attributed to us at birth. In the same vein, we’re all well-acquainted with the process of applying for a job, for insurance, for a visa, or for a new passport or identity card. Whilst innocent on the surface, these everyday bureaucratic obstacles maintain a destructive potential. They demand that we distil our identities to a handful of standardized, non-negotiable categories. Our year of birth. Our nationality. Our ethnicity. Our religion. The colour of our skin. But what of those who don’t fit the mould? Of course, Identity is a far more complicated notion than a series of ticked boxes might imply. Identity is fluid and ever-changing. At the individual level, a
sense of self is constantly renegotiated, changing shape in relation to the perception of the other. It is the product of a complex web of affiliations with an infinite number of varying groups, ideas, people and places. Furthermore, personal crises of identity might take hold with greater force at different junctures of life, or in response to unfamiliar challenges. It is probably fair to assume that the question of identity has forever occupied a position of great importance in the human mind, and that it will always continue to do so. The same can be said of the relationship between photography and identity. If the submissions to our 2016 Talent Call – as well as the resulting Foam Magazine #45: Talent – are anything to go by, identity is still firmly on the agenda for a new generation of emerging photographers. The work of a number of the featured Talents, including Leo Maguire, Louise Parker, Ilona Szwarc, Katinka Goldberg and Juno Calypso could happily have found a place within this issue. For the Editors of Foam Magazine, the question of how best to tackle the spectrum of identity and its various subchapters with only eight portfolios has presented countless challenges. In
short, difficult choices have been made along the way. So, what to expect? Beyond our set of regular features, which chronicle the recent work of a whole host of talented image-makers, the portfolios are striking in their breadth and together offer diverse readings of the theme. Izumi Miyazaki uses her own brand of vibrant self-portraiture to assert her identity with a new-found confidence, whilst Jon Rafman takes a more objective approach, presenting without judgement a world of weird and wonderful online subcultures. Elsewhere, Dana Lixenberg elects to zoom out, focusing on the makeup of a community over time in her stunning portraits of the residents of Imperial Courts. Hiroshi Okamoto’s Recruit speaks of the relationship between success in the job market and masculinity in a Japanese context, whilst the work of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore – two figures who forever defied categorization – remains notably topical. The list goes on. We are proud to present an issue of Foam Magazine with yet another burning issue at its core. Relax, take a seat, and let the soul-searching commence. We sincerely hope you enjoy reading.
What’s new?
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ANOUK KRUITHOF
I’m currently in New York, terrified about AUTOMAGIC, the extensive book-project I’ve worked on for the last five years. 1000 editions of the book sit aboard a vessel operated by a newly bankrupted shipping company, stranded at sea somewhere near Valencia. The book draws from my AUTOMAGIC archive, taken with iPhones and small digital cameras over the past twelve years. My aim is not to present a clear narrative, allowing instead a story to emerge from the viewer’s own memories and associations. Nine visual stories are presented in nine different books, connected by a book of text and housed in a transparent acrylic box. AUTOMAGIC explores an image archive transformed by analogue photomontages, screenshots, reproductions, editing, and additional text. The diversity of concepts in each book is expressed by using different papers, culminating in a sculpted, multi-layered book-object.
ANOUK KRUITHOF (b. 1981, NL) has exhibited worldwide, from MoMA to Moscow’s Multimedia Art Museum. Her work appears in the collections of Foam, Aperture Foundation and the Stedelijk Museum. Anouk is a previous recipient of the Charlotte Köhler Prize and the ICP’s Infinity Award. She is director of the Anamorphosis Prize and founder of the publishing platform stresspress.biz. Anouk – who works between Mexico City, New York and Amsterdam – was featured as a Foam Talent in 2009.
Self Portrait
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MAYUMI HOSOKURA What happens when you grant a photographer carte blanche to portray herself as she sees fit? Do the resulting images reveal anything surprising about the creative in question? With this Self Portrait, Mayumi Hosokura invites us into her world, providing a closer look at her context, her work and the things that inspire her.
Snapshots – A visual diary
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Matthew Leifheit MATTHEW LEIFHEIT (b. 1988, US) is a writer, photographer and curator. As well as self-publishing MATTE - a magazine platform for emerging and established artists - he works as Photo Editor-atLarge for Vice Magazine. Having contributed photos and texts to various past issues of Foam, Matthew’s collaborative body of work with Cynthia Talmadge saw him featured as a Foam Talent 2015. Matthew is currently pursuing his MFA at Yale University, where he is a staff photographer for the Yale Daily News.
Snapshots – A visual diary
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Christian Patterson CHRISTIAN PATTERSON (b. 1972, US) lives in New York. His 2011 book Redheaded Peckerwood won the Recontres d’Arles Author Book Award and in 2015 he published Bottom of the Lake. Patterson is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the 2015 Vevey International Photography Award. He is represented by Rose Gallery in Santa Monica and Robert Morat in Berlin. His work was featured in Foam Magazine #30: Micro.
Toolbox
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#Dysturb
How does a project come to life? What does it take to create it? From different tools to inspiring materials, each project needs a number of ingredients in its recipe. For this edition of Toolbox, #Dysturb take us on a journey through the largest public platform they know: the streets. Frustrated that their images rarely made their way into newspapers, a group of photojournalists formed #Dysturb in 2014. They quickly garnered a significant global following. Often defined as a collective – and elsewhere as a movement – #Dysturb aims to make international news stories accessible by positioning documentary street art firmly within the urban landscape, fostering discussion and debate wherever their work appears.
Toolbox
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Portrait by ClĂŠment Lambelet
Interview
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Bruno Ceschel The Post-Revolution (chicken katsu curry fuelled) Interview: Elisa Medde Images: Jacques-Aurélien Brun, Quentin Lacombe, Clément Lambelet
From interning at COLORS magazine to learning the ins and out of the photobook trade from Chris Boot, Bruno Ceschel – writer, editor and director of Self Publish, Be Happy – has always kept his finger firmly on the pulse of the community around him. Amidst a packed programme of events at the recent edition of Amsterdam’s Unseen Photo Fair, Bruno found time to discuss the digital revolution, adapting to the changing photographic landscape, and why he still finds endless pleasure in books. In line with his commitment to emerging talent, Bruno asked three alumni of ECAL, where he is a visiting lecturer, to photograph him in their own distinct styles. Clément Lambelet’s opening portrait, created by subverting a facial recognition algorithm called Eigenface, combines multiple pictures to extract the different features of the subject. With his image, Jacques-Aurélien Brun adopts a more traditional approach, followed by Quentin Lacombe’s dreamy collage.
Interview many people have grown up with the belief that content is free. So often people say ‘oh, why am I not paid to do this’ and my answer is, ‘because you’re listening to music for free, you download movies for free, you expect everything to be free’. If you think that content is free, why would you think you should be paid for your content? It’s not their fault, they’ve just grown up with this dangerous idea. Unfortunately, it has long-term consequences, as people are not going to value content in monetary terms. At the end of the day, you pay your rent with money. So I think that maybe when you start complaining about not being paid, you might want to review the way that you approach content. And photographers and artists are content providers. That’s what they are. Content in the form of a book, a print, an assignment or whatever else, but that’s content, and — rightly so — that should be purchased like any other content. So I do think that on the one hand, the world has changed, and we have to adapt to a way of life whereby work is like a puzzle. On the other hand, perhaps it’s time to reconsider the way we value content. EM
o where are we going? What are the S kids doing now?
BC
I think that the new generation is looking to the future through the filter of the past. You see it in hipster culture, in modernist furniture, 90s fashion, vintage bikes, as well as in music that endlessly reassembles samples from the past, or in cinema with the fucking remakes, reboots and franchises. Of course, you also see it in the way pictures are made. I think that, culturally, there is this general tendency in Western societies to look back and be very nostalgic about a past time which is perceived to be better than the one we live in.
EM
BC
ould this be because, when you live C in the fragile and scattered present tense, people seek refuge, rather than jumping into the madness and trying to make something new? I see why that’s the case but I don’t know if we should just accept that as a given. In other parts of human history during moments of deep crisis, there has been a strong response in the form of revolution and radical
28 change. And I do think that photography is very conservative on the whole, and that’s a limiting factor. On the other hand, Instagram and photosharing for example has prompted a revolution of the human language; the way that photography is now so connected to the mobile phone, and the way exchanging photographs has become a means to communicate with one another. My mom and I mostly speak through photos in a WhatsApp chat. It may be true that some areas of the photography world are still quite reluctant to make changes, but then other changes have already been pushed forward by society at large. EM
How have you attempted to challenge this reluctance to embrace new approaches?
BC
I worked recently with Lucas Blalock on an augmented reality project. I’d been interested in developing something for the mobile phone for a long time, but I never had the chance until I was commissioned by Tate Modern to run a program of events during Offprint London. I turned to Lucas because – given the way he uses and misuses Photoshop in some of his work – I knew that technology could be a stimulating tool for him. He was very responsive, excited, and slightly terrified. Over the course of four months he worked and workshopped with a digital agency and created both the travelling installation and accompanying book, Making Memeries, which explores the blurring boundaries surrounding the online/ offline existence of photographs. I don’t know if that’s the future, but I think it’s a road that needs to be explored. And that’s the whole point; you don’t know until you try. That’s generally the attitude one should have, instead of locking themselves in the comfort of the past.
EM
Do you have plans for the future, or is Self Publish, Be Happy going to remain at the centre of your activities?
BC
I’m still very excited about Self Publish, Be Happy. It’s natural to start feeling tired of something after a while, but because Self Publish, Be Happy is very much crafted around me, I can always radically change it. For example, if you were to open a restaurant, you might be really excited by it at the beginning, but a
couple of years down the line, you’re still serving carbonara because people want carbonara. I’m in the lucky position where I can say, ‘you know what, no more carbonara here. We’re going to move to chicken katsu curry now.’ And I think that’s an incredible position to be in! It’s a risky one, because someone might not want chicken katsu curry, but at least I’m satisfied that I don’t have to repeat the same thing. That’s the limit, and the beauty of it, because Self Publish, Be Happy is an independent organization, free from any kind of structure and public funding. If you have a physical space where you have to pay the monthly rent, immediately the way that you think about your activity is influenced by it: ‘I have to make this amount of money per month to pay the rent’, and we don’t have that. We are completely free to be very adventurous about what we do and how we do it. EM
o finish off: If you had to give one T piece of advice to a young person working with visual languages, be it photography or bookmaking, what would it be?
BC
Keep yourself curious and engaged. If you are engaged with the world around you, you’ll be fine.
JACQUES-AURÉLIEN BRUN (b. 1992, CH), QUENTIN LACOMBE (b. 1990, FR) and CLÉMENT LAMBELET (b. 1991, CH) are young, emerging photo graphers. They all studied – and now work as teaching assistants – at the prestigious art and design university, École cantonale dʼart de Lausanne (ECAL), Switzerland. All images are courtesy of ECAL. BRUNO CESCHEL (b. 1976, IT) is a writer, editor, publisher and lecturer at the Camberwell College of Arts, London and ECAL, Switzerland. He is the founder and director of the curatorial project Self Publish, Be Happy, which has organised events at various institutions including Tate Modern, The Photographer’s Gallery, Serpentine Galleries, C/O Berlin, and Copenhagen Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Ceschel writes regularly for various publications, and has published numerous photography books by the likes of Lucas Blalock, Lorenzo Vitturi, Mariah Robertson and Peter Puklus. His book, Self Publish, Be Happy: A DIY Photobook Manual and Manifesto, was published by Aperture Foundation in 2015. ELISA MEDDE (b. 1981, IT) is Managing Editor of Foam Magazine.
Unexpected Marriages
29
Ari Marcopoulos Celebrating Startling Collaborations
Ă— Gucci
IZuMi MiYAzAki p.51
AMAK MAHMoOdIaN p.71
DANA liXeNBeRg p.91
NamsA leUBa p.111
Text by Russet Lederman
Text by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
WHo WE ARE
Text by Colin Pantall
Text by Joseph Gergel
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JOn RafMaN p.155
HIrOshi OkAmOto p.175
C. cAhUN – m. Moore p.195
lAuRIe siMmOnS p.215
Text by Gary Zhexi Zhang
Text by Kim Knoppers
portfolio overview
Text by Russet Lederman
Text by William J. Simmons
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WHo WE ARE
more on page 200 >>
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sCatteReD MirrOrs Text: Marcel Feil Images: Irina Popova
There is increasing uncertainty about the value and significance of our biological, socio-political, national, professional, religious and sexual identities, and about which should be given priority. At the same time, recent developments in science, and especially biomedical techniques, have made ways of identifying individuals increasingly easy. Fingerprints, voice recognition, iris scans and DNA profiles make it possible to construct databases containing precisely the unique information that distinguishes us from each other. WHo WE ARE
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We aRe constantly putting out signals, verbal and non-verbal, that are deSigned to express wHO we want to be
being unique, intractable, non-conformist and authentic, is regarded more as a danger than as a strength. What is important within the rapidly emerging new social order is the way in which people reorganize and shape their identities. We see people constantly trying out new options and possibilities as they go about the never-ending task of do-it-yourself identity building. Lifestyle coaching, speed dating, therapy culture, self-help literature, reality TV, cosmetic surgery, compulsive consumption: all these things can be placed under the heading of reinvention. Far from being applicable only on an individual Botox level, it is a term that is taking root no less firmly within the globalized business world, in which continual reorganization, recalibration and transformation is the order of the day. The speed and intensity of these processes is unprecedented. We live
WHo WE ARE
in a world where the transformation and reinvention of identities is deeply connected with a social acceleration which, to quote Milan Kundera, is driven by ‘pure speed’. Life in the new individualistic fast lane is often an extremely subversive affair. The current cultural fascination with instant change and endless self-transformation creates a world in which long-term solutions and true sustainability repeatedly prove all too fragile time and again. This inevitably raises questions about the degree to which it is possible, under current worldwide conditions, to model a stable, adult and deeply rooted identity, an identity of which resistance and rebellion are part, an identity that is strong enough to take a stand against unwelcome developments. 2. MOBILITY Which brings us to mobility as an influential factor in the current process of forming and
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mobility and post-humanism, then it is also influenced by a change to our affect, the pattern of observable behaviour through which a subjective feeling finds its expression. The formation and reformation of our identity is after all largely shaped by our affections, and our investment, driven by desires, wishes and fantasies, in the human subject. The processes of transformation that our planet went through in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and indeed is still going through, processes as far-reaching as they are fascinating, ultimately extend deep into the structures of our subjectivity and touch people’s spiritual and emotional lives in the most intimate ways. According to some critics of modern and postmodern culture, an awareness of community and a recognition of each individual’s civic responsibility have degenerated into the compulsive, narcissistic satisfaction of the modern consumer. Whether or not this is true, we live in ostentatious times in which everything seems to revolve around ourselves and our own needs. We are continually reminded that our self and our identity is of prime importance, and constantly encouraged to think first of all about ourselves, usually in the most superficial, consumption-driven manner. Our emotions have become heightened to a remarkable degree and at the same time alarmingly superficial. 5. FORMULA Yet it often seems as though our identity as it exists for others is mainly determined by a totality of characteristics about which we have no say: our sex, our name and surname, our height, skin colour, fingerprints and suchlike. This is the information asked of us when our identity needs to be confirmed. The motive is always the same, of course, namely the reduction of a complex human individual to a small passport photo, an iris scan, a PIN number or a series of digits. Identification is always a matter of reduction based on practical objectives, and in essence it always falls short. Powerful MRI scans and fascinat-
WHo WE ARE
ing developments in neurotechnology make it possible to shed new light on our brain activity and on neural processes that are perhaps connected with self-control and our selfconsciousness. But science is reductive by definition, and the latest attempts to determine what makes us who we are may be simply a modern variation on the attempts of nineteenth century phrenology to deduce personality based on the size and shape of the skull. Who we are will probably never be straightforwardly determined using scans, formulae or data. We are infinitely more than the sum of our parts and with time – both our own individual time and our collective time – we continually change, reform and transform under the influence of complex social interactions with ourselves and our environment. And we will continue to ask who we are. After all, little is so fascinating for ourselves as our selves.
IRINA POPOVA (b. 1986, RU/NL) is an award-winning Russian/Dutch photographer, filmmaker, writer and curator. She studied photography at FotoDepartment, St. Petersburg, and at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. Her work – which has been widely exhibited and published internationally – often focuses on themes of sincerity, privacy and marginality. For her project The Incomplete Princess Book [www.incompleteprincess.com], Popova trawled through social networks to identify registered users that shared her name. The resulting project comprises around 36,000 images, and considers the differing possibilities for a woman’s destiny in a Russian context.
MARCEL FEIL (b. 1968, NL) is Deputy Artistic Director at Foam and Editor of Foam Magazine.
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IZUMi MIYAZAkI IZUMI MIyAzAkI IZuMI MIYAZakI IZuMi MIyAZAkI IZUmi MIYazAki IzUMI MIYAZAkI IZuMI MIyAZAkI IZUMi MIYAzAki iZUMI MIYAZAkI IZumI MIYAZAki KOWAI KAWAII
Kowai Kawaii — SCary Cute BY RUSSET LEDERMAN
Children without siblings often create rich fantasy worlds to fill the hours spent alone. Ideas can run wild, and the results can be simultaneously seductive and unsettling. The first time I saw photographer – and only child – Izumi Miyazaki’s self-portrait of her blankly staring severed head laying sideways on a saturated pink background with a delicate puddle of red tomatoes spilling from her neck, I knew I was being drawn into a world not quite like any other. Miyazaki’s meticulously crafted photographs are at once familiar and otherworldly, elegant fusions of classic horror film tropes filtered through surrealism, fashion photography and Japanese kawaii (cute) culture. They are cute, but they are also a bit scary – an ambiguity that elevates them beyond kitsch and into the realm of fine art. A graduate of the prestigious Musashino Art University in Tokyo, Miyazaki’s trajectory reads like an internet fairytale. Born in Yamanashi Prefecture, west of Tokyo, Miyazaki began photographing in high school with her mother’s borrowed Pentax camera. She found inspiration and recognition online and through social media. Now twenty years old, Miyazaki, who has been sharing her photographs on Tumblr since she
WHo WE ARE
was a teenager, has received a modicum of internet fame and thousands of followers. Miyazaki’s east-meets-west visual language is a global mash-up imbued with a distinctly Japanese sense of identity, whose roots can be found in cos-play (costume players based on anime and manga characters), and in the mid-1990s onna no ko shashinka movement of Japanese ‘girl photo graphers’. Similar to established Japanese women photographers such as Tomoko Sawada and Miwa Yanagi, Miyazaki exploits traditional Japanese adolescent girl and female roles as a way of gaining a measure of personal freedom within a more tradition-bound cultural context. She says, ‘I like the work of photo artist Miwa Yanagi, where all the women ironically have the same expression and seem void of personalities.’ Miyazaki’s selfies, which often reproduce her own emotionless likeness multiple times in a single image, allow her to slyly enact a strategy for empowerment through fantastical and bizarre constructions that merge sex and violence with shojo (girl) stereotypes. Colour and composition reach new heights in Miyazaki’s exacting surreal compositions. Always at the
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IZumI MIYAzAkI
RUSSET LEDERMAN
(b. 1994, JP) studied photography at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo. In 2012 she created a Tumblr blog dedicated to her surreal self-portraits, sparking interest both domestically and internationally surrounding her work. Since then she has appeared in Snappp magazine and exhibited at the Wild Project Gallery in Luxembourg (2016). She lives and works in Tokyo.
(b. 1961, US) is a media artist, writer and photobook collector who lives in New York. She teaches media art theory and writing at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She regularly writes on photobooks, including for the International Center of Photography’s library blog. She is a co-organiser of the 10X10 Photobooks project and has received awards and grants from Prix Ars Electronica and the Smithsonian American Art museum.
All images Š Izumi Miyazaki
WHo WE ARE
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AMAK MAhMOODIAN AmaK MaHmooDiAn AMAK MAHMOODIAN AmaK MaHmooDiAN AMAk MAhMOODIAn AMaK MaHMooDiAN AmAk MAhmOODIan AMaK MaHMOoDiAN AmAk MAHmoODIan AMAK MahMOODIAN AMAk MAHmooDIaN AMAK MaHMOODiAn AmAk MAHmOoDIaN AMaK MahMOODIAn ShENASNAmEh
wHo wOmen aRe By COLIN PANTALL
At first glance, Amak Mahmoodian’s Shenasnameh seems quite dry. The project (and accompanying book) is made up of a series of pictures of Iranian women taken from their shenasnameh, Iran’s domestic identity certificate. The shenasnameh comes complete with personal details, fingerprints and a photograph of the person it identifies, a photograph that had to be renewed every 10 years, according to a law that has meanwhile been changed. Through these photographs, Mahmoodian tells us both the story of the women who feature in her book, and the ways in which photography functions at the official, personal and social level. It’s a book of personal identities that come through eyes and looks and the turn of the mouth, mixed with official identities of fingerprints and photographs rejected due to an ‘excess’ of make-up or hair. The project started 6 years ago when Mahmoodian and her mother were having their shenasnameh pictures renewed. ‘The idea came to me immediately,’ she tells me in an interview in her hometown of Bristol. ‘I saw the pictures of myself and my mother and I went home and thought, I’m going to make a project about that. The same day I started asking my neighbours if I could borrow their shenasnameh photographs.’
WHo WE ARE
As Mahmoodian collected the photographs (and accompanying fingerprints) she noticed how, despite the compulsory chador and the absence of any hair or non-facial features in the photographs, the women look so different to each other. Sometimes photographs were sent to her by people she had never met. For these images, Mahmoodian would travel to meet the women and collect their fingerprints. ‘I started to notice how different they were, especially in their look. It was really emotional for me, because in many cases I had their photograph but I had never met the woman. I would imagine her voice and her smile, her eyes, her life. And then I would go and meet the woman and when I knocked at the door, it was like I was going to meet a photograph. Sometimes I was really shocked because the woman was so different from the portrait I had imagined from the photograph. So each woman was different from another and then each woman was different from her photograph.’ In the book, these identity photographs are paired with fingerprints. The eyes stare out of the page at you and the viewer imagines who these women are; there is tenderness, defiance, anger, questioning, humour, and love in these images. Turn the pages, however, and another side
more on page 89 >>
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AmAk MAhmOODIaN
COLIN PANTALL
(b. 1980, IR) is an Iranian artist and curator. She is a graduate of Photography and Documentary Photography (MA) from the Art University of Tehran, and in 2015 received her PhD in Art and Photography from the University of South Wales, UK. In 2016 she copublished with ICVL Studio & RRB Publishing her first limited-edition book, Shenasnameh, which received a special mention at Maribor Photobook Award, Slovenia and was a finalist for the Best British Book Design and Production of the year. She has exhibited at Ffotogallery, Cardiff and Goethe-Institut, Chennai. She lives and works in the UK.
(b. 1963, UK) is a writer, photographer, blogger and senior lecturer on the Documentary Photography Course at the University of South Wales. Pantall holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Bristol and an MA in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales, Newport. He has written for a number of leading publications on an impressive range of themes, from the environment to politics. He is a contributing writer to the British Journal of Photography and also writes for Magnum Photos upcoming Publication on Magnum and China. His photobook, All Quiet on the Home Front will be published in 2018.
All images Š Amak Mahmoodian
WHo WE ARE
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NAMsA lEUBA nAMSa LEuBa NAmSA LEUBA naMSA lEuBA NAMSA LEUBA naMsa LEuBA NAMSA lEuBA NAmsA LEUBA nAMSa LEUBA ISIGQI
ORdiNary Life By Joseph Gergel
As a photographer working across documentary, fashion and performance, Namsa Leuba’s artistic practice defies compartmentalization. Equally comfortable working in the rural villages of Guinea Conakry as she is in the commercial studios of Paris and New York, Namsa Leuba combines an anthropological interest in traditional customs with an aesthetic that is informed by sartorial and design sensibilities. Leuba creates a visual imaginary that explores the signs and symbols of her cultural heritage, from rituals and ceremonies to statuettes and masquerades. Adopting a theatrical approach with careful attention to props, colours and gestures, her projects explore multiple points of cultural collision as she searches for the middle ground between fixed modes of representation.
spontaneous, unrehearsed and possess a more fundamentally raw character. Some are taken at the height of action, others at quiet moments of reflection. In one sense, they are about a stranger getting adjusted to her new surroundings. In another, they are about an intimate connection with a culture that transcends the visual.
ISIGQI brings together a collection of photographs taken during the artist’s six month residency in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2014. While Leuba created several long-term projects during her time in South Africa, this publication consists of the ‘outtakes’ of images throughout her travels around the country. Whereas her other series focuses on the constructed image, the images in ISIGQI are
The photographs in ISIGQI are filled with the mundane aspects of ordinary life in South Africa. Images of the urban environment are contrasted with idyllic rural landscapes. These are divided by scenes of nightlife and entertainment as well as portraits of performers, workers, artists and students. While guided by her experience in South Africa, the images do not end at mere documentation. Rather, they have been cropped, manipulated and edited to create an ambiguous narrative. In one image, a man poses wearing a makeshift costume of animal fur, shells and broken cans. The image has been digitally altered to create green-tinted skin and an orange-hue background. The subject becomes isolated on a flat picture plane as his surroundings are edited out. With the clothing and accessories created by Leuba, the image is more about the artist’s own cultural imaginary than it is
WHo WE ARE
more on page 109 >>
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NAmSA LEuBA
JOSEPH GERGEL
(b.1982, CH/GN) is a Swiss-Guinean photographer who explores African identity through Western imagination. She received her BA and MA from ECAL, Switzerland. In 2013, she won the Magenta Foundation’s prize for emerging photographers, and her work has been featured in exhibitions including Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (2015) and Daegu Photo Biennale, South Korea (2014). Her work has been published in I-D, Vice Magazine and New York Magazine. She currently lives and works in Switzerland.
(b. 1986, USA) is an independent curator and writer based in Lagos, Nigeria. He currently serves as a curatorial adviser to Art Twenty One and Arthouse Contemporary, two contemporary art organizations in Lagos, as well as a curator at Moon Man Studios in London. Gergel was co-curator of three editions of LagosPhoto, the international festival of photography in Nigeria, and has written for publications including Aperture, British Journal of Photography, DIS Magazine and Art Africa.
All images Š Namsa Leuba
WHo WE ARE
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DANA LIXENBERG DANA LiXEnBERg DAna LIxENBERG DANA LIXEnBErg DanA LIxENBERG DANA LiXEnBErg DANA LIxENBERG DAnA LiXEnBErG DANA LIXENBERg DAnA LiXENBErG ImPERIAl COuRTS
We tHe spectatORs By STANLEY WOLUKAUWANAMBWA
ʻThose who dismiss names as detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. This is why they insist upon their identity being recognised, insist upon their continuity – their links with their dead and the unborn.ʼ – John Berger ʻThe Soul and the Operatorʼ Dana Lixenberg’s Imperial Courts begins with a rejection of tremendous importance. In a series of photographs made in Watts, Los Angeles, beginning after riots broke out at the acquittal of four police officers filmed savagely beating Rodney King, and ending in the combustible spring of 2015, the work addresses the fissured nature of race’s intersection with equality and American identity. Yet it does so without surrendering to the reflex linkage of blackness with pathological criminality or violence, rejecting spectacular forms of either, and focusing instead on the shifting trajectories of a group of individuals bound together in a community in the overflown precincts of an inner-city American ghetto.
the triggering incident of King’s beating, the LAPD officers’ acquittal, the ensuing riots, but also from the recent (and seemingly relentless) stream of videos of police killings of unarmed black and brown Americans in the present day. Notably, in the same year that Lixenberg’s work on Imperial Courts began, Routledge Books published a short volume of essays entitled Reading Rodney King/ Reading Urban Uprising. In it, Judith Butler wrote of the infamous footage of King’s beating, and the subsequent acquittal of his attackers that it ʻmay appear at first that over and against this heinous failure to see police brutality, it is necessary to restore the visible as the sure ground of evidence.ʼ
Lixenberg’s multi-generational series of portraits is inseparable both from
If the intervening twenty plus years between the King footage and the videoed strangulation – better yet lynching – of Eric Garner have demonstrated anything, it is surely that the camera image’s evidentiary value is neither automatic, nor are its facts transparent in the contested theatre of race. Thus, as Butler wrote then, ʻwhat the trial and its horrific conclusions teach us is that there is no simple recourse to the visible, to visual evidence, that it still and always calls to be read, that it is already a reading…ʼ
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Ramona, 1993
Untitled V, 2013
Laquita, 1993
Floss, 2012 Kashmir’s father
Shawna with her son Kashmir, 2013
Peanut, 1993
DAnA LIxENBERG (b. 1964, NL) divides her time between New York and Amsterdam. She focuses on long-term projects, mainly addressing individuals and communities on the margins of society. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vrij Nederland and Vibe amongst others. In 2015, she exhibited Imperial Courts 1993-2015 at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam. A book with the same title was published by Roma Publications (Amsterdam) and was shortlisted for the Photobook of the Year Award by Paris Photo and the Aperture Foundation (2015). Dana Lixenberg, with Imperial Courts, has also been shortlisted for the Deutsche BĂśrse Photography Foundation Prize 2017.
STANLEY WOLUKAUWANAMBWA (b. 1980, UK) is a photographer, writer, and editor for the website The Great Leap Sideways. He has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Vanessa Winship, George Georgiou, and Paul Graham, been an artist in residence at Light Work, guest edited the Aperture Photobook Review and is a faculty member in the photography department at Purchase College, SUNY.
All images Š Dana Lixenberg
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Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 14th September 2014), (The End) © Amalia Ulman, courtesy of the artist and Arcadia Missa
A SECOND LIFE
The birth of the Internet created the utopia of a democratic space in which anyone can be anything. A space of freedom where – without class, race, or other social hierarchies – we can anonymously explore whatever ideas or fantasies we may have without fear of reprisal, and where we are free to perform one personality after another. How do artists reflect on the nature of digital identity, in light of the rapid rise of social media platforms? WHo by mirjam AM I kooiman
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First trip to the Louvre, Instagram Update, 2016 courtesy of @lilmiquela
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What do we communicate about ourselves over screens, and how does this relate to our real-space identities? Through a study of different artistic approaches towards our digital identities, this article is a humble attempt to grasp how the disembodied experience of our online personas ultimately emerges in physical form again, dissolving the distinction between the virtual and the real. The ongoing commercialization of the World Wide Web has gradually stripped us of the online anonymity we once enjoyed. Instead, our digital identities now reveal more about our ‘true’ selves than we could ever have imagined.
ONA In April 2014, Amalia Ulman (@amaliaulman) uploaded an image to her Instagram feed, entitled Part I: Excellences & Perfections. For the next four months, she posted a series of images that seemed to document her attempt to make it as an ‘It girl’ in Los Angeles. In her selfies, Ulman is seen taking a bath in a luxurious hotel room, or in expensive lingerie on ruffled bed sheets. Elsewhere, her Instagram presents close-ups of rose petals and perfectly-plated brunches. A breast enlargement, drug addiction, pole-dancing lessons and numerous selfies later, Ulman announced that she had been staging a scripted online art performance called Excellences & Perfections via her Instagram and Facebook accounts. In a way, and just like Ulman, we are all performing online (or at least the generation of ‘digital natives’ to which I belong). Any one person may have a dating profile on Happn, a LinkedIn account to establish professional networks, a Facebook profile to keep in touch
a second life
with friends, an Instagram account to share their polished selfies and a Twitter account to make witty 140-character comments on whatever is happening in the world. Artist Leah Schrager calls these virtual profiles or presences ʻonasʼ: online personas. Each person may exhibit one or more of these onas, which may operate in concert or separately. In her article The Ona Generation, which reads somewhat like a manifesto, Schrager states that the current online generation (‘OnaGen’) doesn’t have alter egos, but multiple ones. Even though Amalia Ulman’s portrayal of the fantasy lifestyle of an Instagram ‘It girl’ was meticulously constructed, the performance remains related to her physical self. It was Ulman, after all, who acted out the fictional narrative in front of her smartphone’s camera. The Instagram account of ‘Lil Miquela’ (@ lilmiquela), however, blurs the line between fantasy and reality to the extent that her followers engage in fierce discussions as to whether she is a real person or not. With facial features
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allowed to watch on Netflix depending on your location. Writer, artist and technologist James Bridle created a tool entitled ‘Citizen Ex’, which calculates your ‘algorithmic citizenship’: a form of citizenship which is not assigned at birth, or through complex legal documents, but through data. Bridle’s browser extension makes visible how each individual Internet surfer uses IP addresses to map where they are and where each website they visit might be based. Over time, it forms a picture of the geographical spread of the user’s browsing. Bridle explains on the tool’s website citizen-ex.com how government surveillance agencies like the NSA and GCHQ use your algorithmic citizenship to decide whether to spy on you. Since the NSA is forbidden from spying on US citizens, they use browsing data to assign a percentage score to everyone on the Internet. If the score drops below 50% American, they can then record them as different laws apply. The Internet turns out to be far from a remote universe in which we can anonymously explore our desires and fetishes – it is comprised of satellites, servers, amplifiers, switches and cables storing our personal data and constantly updating our online DNA as we expose ourselves more and more. The physicality of our online personas is made visible in AnnieLaurie Erickson’s two-part project Data Shadows (2014), borrowing a term used in the Internet security business to refer to the invisible trails we leave behind on remote servers in the form of photographs, status updates, GPS coordinates, phone records and other personal data as we traverse the Internet. Erickson travelled some 25,000 kilometres to photograph the sites of data centres and server farms across the United States. From every Google Data Center in the country to the main data facilities of Apple and Facebook and numerous corporate data centres, her photographs of Data Shadows - Exteriors reveal massive, fenced compounds that suddenly look conspicuously anonymous. This is where our online identities are shaped and stored. Data Shadows – Interiors shows the enigmatic bundles of wires
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connecting computer hardware with blue and green lights, strongly resembling illustrations of the genetic code of DNA. Whichever personas we choose to adopt on the Internet, our online identities now complement our physical selves in ways that reveal much more about who we truly are than our genetics could ever do alone.
MIRJAM KOOIMAN (b. 1990, NL) is a curator at Foam, where she has worked on shows including Magnum Contact Sheets, Ai Weiwei #SafePassage as well as the Foam Talent 2015 exhibition. She holds a BA in Art History and an MA in Curating from the University of Amsterdam, with a special interest in postcolonial approaches in the arts and museum studies. She previously served as a curator in training at the photography collection of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Mirjam lives and works in Amsterdam.
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ScannIng tHe Self
First Surgery-Performance, ORLAN reading La Robe by Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, July 1990 © ORLAN, courtesy of the artist
Although photography’s claim to truth has been challenged from the outset, the medium has long maintained its uncontested status as an objective recorder and reproducer of identity in the realm of biological and medical science. Who would argue with an MRI-scan or an X-ray? by hinde haest
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But even this last stronghold of objective identification is increasingly crumbling as photographers question the scientific fundamentals from which the medium itself originated. Still, the role of (digital) imagery in such disciplines as genetic and facial profiling is as unfathomable as it is contested.
Photography has challenged the relationship between essence and appearance since its invention. When Daguerre patented the Daguerreotype in 1839, he described the medium as a ‘chemical and physical process that allows nature to reproduce herself’. Five years later Henri Fox Talbot published his calotypes under the title The Pencil of Nature (1844). The photograph lay the basis for pseudo sciences of physiognomy (features of the face), phrenology (shape of the skull) and pathognomy (expressions of emotions), which held the physique to be a representation of the inner self, and the face a revelation of one’s character. Duchenne de Boulogne famously documented the ‘gymnastics of the soul’ in his Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine (1862) by photographing how muscles in the human face produce facial expressions, whilst Hugh Diamond used the photographic portrait to scientifically analyse his patients’ inner psyches. In the first novel ever to feature a photograph, Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (1851), the daguerreotype was said to harbour the villain’s true evil personality, revealing his deceitfulness like an early photographic Picture of Dorian Gray. Amidst a contemporary industriousness of online profiling, the role of photography as
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the ‘mirror of the soul’ has become obsolete. Instead of a representation of the sitter’s singular identity, the photograph facilitates a process of continuous identification. The nineteenth century individual would cherish his singular and irreproducible daguerreotype portrait in a velvet-lined box like a precious gem. By contrast, the contemporary individual floods the internet with fleeting variations of multiple selves that cater to different audiences. Visual identity thus partially shifts from the sender to the receiver, who can piece together an image depending on his or her level of access to various sets of data. It is on the interface between identity and identification that we can also position the work of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. The relation between data access and identity politics lies at the core of their publication, Spirit is a Bone (2015). It features constructed ‘portraits’ taken with a device used for facial recognition technologies, which renders a three-dimensional data map of the face based on hundreds of overlaid images. The resulting image is largely based on bone-structure and other biological features that cannot easily be manipulated, leaving a homogenized mask-like impression of the face.
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The Doctor from Spirit is a Bone, 2013 Š Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin / MACK, courtesy of the artists
scanning the self
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engineering begs the question: to what extent is the body still a referent of the individual? Tammi questions the body as the container of identity in her latest work, White Rabbit Fever (2016). The invented disease is illustrated by the decaying corpse of a rabbit, as well as a microscopic image of HeLa cells grown by the artist in a lab in Helsinki. The HeLa cells were originally taken from the body of Henrietta Lacks in 1950s and were the first human cells ever grown in culture. The ‘immortal cells’ have since been cultivated for the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization. Tammi’s photograph evokes a number of questions. What, or rather who, are we looking at? Is this a portrait of Henrietta Lacks, the black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia? Are we looking at the future receiver of these cells? Or are we looking at a sample of a collectively shared humanity? The work of Tammi thus questions the very definition of the body as a container of the self. If the ‘spirit is a bone’, then how do tissue transplantation, genetic modification and biomedical engineering affect individuality? The transience, fluidity and immortality of cells fundamentally confuses the clear-cut dichotomy between life and death, prompting us to reconsider where one individual ends and another begins. By adopting the scientific categorization that also lay at the basis of phrenology, contemporary photographers such as Tammi, Broomberg and Chanarin turn the definition of identity as a biological or genetic composite back on itself.
HINDE HAEST (b. 1987, NL) is a curator at Foam. Previously, she has worked on the Stephen Shore retrospective at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam and as an assistant curator of photographs at the Victoria & Albert museum, London. She holds an Msc from SOAS, an MA from University College London, and has written for Metropolis M and Aperture. Hinde lives and works in Amsterdam.
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ExcaVatINg IDeNtitY
Before & after the destruction of Palmyra’s Temple of Bel, 2016, © Joseph Eid, courtesy of ANP/AFP/JOSEPH EID
Were it not so serious, it would appear comical. Balancing on a red stepladder, a man hacks off a stone head with a pickaxe. The determination to destroy Palmyra in Syria – one of the oldest and most important archaeological sites in the world – is utterly chilling. by kim knoppers
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Elbise-i Osmaniyye – Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie en 1873, Pascal Sebah, courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library
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In other videos made public by ISIS, bearded men vent their rage on precious artefacts, bringing out the heavy artillery in the form of drills and sledge hammers. The destructive mania is not confined to archaeological sites and relics. In the public library in Mosul, still the capital of the Iraqi part of the caliphate, thousands of rare books and ancient manuscripts were burned. It is reminiscent of Berlin in 1933, when the Nazis threw more than twenty thousand ‘degenerate’ books onto a huge pyre. Texts by Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Ernest Hemingway and H.G. Wells were set ablaze without compunction because of the ideas they contained, or the Jewish identity of their authors.
The destruction of ‘idols’ in the name of Islam and the Nazi burning of books written by dissenters cannot be explained solely in terms of ideological motives. The destruction of heritage is an attack on the identity of a people or country. Laying waste to archaeological artefacts, thereby wiping away the traces of ancient civilizations and cultures, enables emerging rulers to start with a clean slate and construct and assert their own identities. Czech author Milan Kundera put it beautifully in his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979): ‘Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life… but forgetting is also the great problem of politics. When a big power wants to deprive a small country of its national consciousness it uses the method of organizing forgetting. A nation which loses awareness of its past gradually loses its self.’ Nevertheless, the opposite happens too, and that is the subject of this article: the use of
ExcaVatINg IDeNtitY
photographic archives to underscore national identity or to construct a collective identity. Those in power play an active role in promoting a common identity by means of photography. Here I explore three examples, in each of which a shared identity is reinforced by means of photography. All three have to do with the fall of the Ottoman Empire. PASCAL SEBAH AND THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IDENTITY OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE The Ottomans took a long time to recognise the political importance of collecting archaeological artefacts and their potential value to a collective identity. Whilst the British and French organised one archaeological expedition after another to the Ottoman Empire as a way of confirming their status and power, the Ottomans themselves started to develop an interest in archaeology only in order to show the Europeans that in Istanbul too, a period of progress had dawned. The Imperial
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systematically, the great Russian Empire in all its beauty: the landscape, the people, and historically important places and monuments. Prokudin-Gorskii soon realised that he would never be able to complete the project without the financial and ideological support of Tsar Nicholas II. He made a number of test prints in spectacular colours and presented them to the Tsar, using a projector. The Tsar was delighted. He had never seen anything like it. He was persuaded to agree to the proposal to make multiple copies of the images that Prokudin-Gorskii intended to produce during his travels and project them in classrooms. The photographs would be used to celebrate the glory of the Russian Empire. Between 1910 and 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii, with his mobile darkroom in the form of a horse and carriage, left for regions that had once formed part of the Ottoman Empire. The money and letters of recommendation given to him by the Tsar meant he had access everywhere. With his handheld camera on a tripod (necessary to deal with the lengthy exposure times), he photographed his subjects three times over, always with one second in between exposures and using different colour filters. The population of these areas comprised an enormous number of ethnic groups. Because the Tsar was financing the project, there is little to be seen in the photos of any social problems. Only apolitical photos would make it into the classrooms. In the approach he took to photographing the different ethnicities of the region, a quasi-anthropological interest in ‘the other’ manifested itself: the Armenian woman, the Kurdish mother with her children, the Georgian men. Prokudin-Gorskii’s archive can be regarded as an expression of the power of the Russian Tsar over a vast area, parts of which once belonged to that its great rival, the Ottoman Empire. In 1915 the Tsar’s support ended because he was coming under fire at home and the power of his great empire was dwindling. Prokudin-Gorskii fled abroad,
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ending up in Paris, where he worked in his studio until the age of eighty-one. From the mid-nineteenth century until the early twentieth, nationalism and the formation of nation states was the prevailing trend. It coincided with the invention and development of photography, which became increasingly important in a period when geopolitical boundaries shifted and the various communities with their separate cultural identities came closer together or disengaged from each other as a result of nation-building. This is demonstrated in the photographs made by Sebah and by Prokudin-Gorskii, commissioned respectively by the Ottoman and Russian authorities. The archive of the commercial Marubi studio contains a great deal of information about Albanian nation-building and it was later deployed by the government as a means of propagating an Albanian identity. For this article I have made use of the following sources: – Edhem Eldem, Mendel – Sebah. Documenting the Imperial Museum, Yapi Kredi Cultural Activities Arts and Publishing 2014 – Zainab Bahrami, Zeynep Çelik, Edhem Eldhem (editors), Scramble for the Past. A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 17531914, SALT/Garanti Kültür A.Ş 2011 – For Elbise-i Osmaniyye – Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie en1873 see: https://archive.org/details/ lescostumespopul00osma – Ahmet A. Ersoy, Architecture and the late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire, Routledge 2015 – For the Marubi database see: http://www.marubi.gov.al/ – Dr. Estelle Blaschke, Nostalgia. The Russian Empire of Czar Nicholas II. Captured in Color Photographs by Sergei Mikhailov ProkudinGorskii, Gestalten, 2012
KIM KNOPPERS (b. 1976, NL) is an art historian (University of Amsterdam) and curator at Foam. Since 2011, she has worked on exhibitions by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Anne de Vries, Jan Hoek, Lorenzo Vitturi and Jan Rosseel to name but a few. Kim is founder of Artists’ Recipes which explores the intersection of art and food. She lives and works in Amsterdam and stays on a regular basis in Istanbul.
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JON RaFMAN JON rAFMan JOn RAFmAN JON RaFman JOn RAFMAN JON rAFMaN JOn RaFmAn STILL LIFE (BETAmAlE)
PLugS By Gary Zhexi Zhang
For me, Jon Rafman will always be one of the seedy sadboys of contemporary art. It has been interesting to witness his rising profile in the last couple of years, with solo exhibitions across the world, including this year’s exquisitely titled I have ten thousand compound eyes and each is named suffering at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Such blockbuster shows, featuring lavish installations and sleek virtual reality productions, have brought the artist’s excavations of digital realms into the broad daylight of commercial and critical acclaim. However, Rafman’s finest works arguably belong where they began: on the internet. They ought to be encountered alone, preferably by accident, your eyes straining into the early hours of the morning, lit only by the glow of the laptop screen. Both ethnographer and native, he has a talent for prising open the darker layers of our technologically mediated psyches. At its best, the work takes your hand and digs deep behind the sofa cushions – buried between the dankness and the debris, your blind fingers discover the warm, crusty contours of something obscenely and desperately vital: a pulse. Like all of us who are enamoured with technology, Rafman is a romantic in
the proper sense, in search of something long gone, or just out of reach. It has been suggested that technology is always about loss. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler attributes humanity's existence as technical beings to the ‘fault of Epimetheus’. Named after ‘hindsight’, Epimetheus was tasked with distributing traits to all the animals – but he ran out before he arrived at human beings, leaving it to his more celebrated fire-giving brother, Prometheus (‘foresight’), to sort out the mess. In this reading, our experience of the world is always already technological, prosthetic, driven on by a gaping hole in the middle. An orifice in search of a plug. In Rafman's online trilogy – to my mind his best work to date – comprising Still Life (Betamale) (2013), Mainsqueeze (2014), and Erysichthon (2015), the artist's internet-enabled gaze surveys a landscape of desire produced by and for technology. The anxious momentum of the digital screen is impelled by libidinal lack, driven to exhaustion and saturation – spent. Taking on the voice of a digital id, these works portray an online unconscious in which permissive freedom produces new frontiers of transgression (cf. Rule 34), and informational abundance invents terrifying excess.
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JOn RAFmAn
GARY ZHEXI ZHANG
(b. 1981, CA) is an artist who explores technology and digital culture. He received a BA in philosophy and literature from McGill University, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. He has exhibited worldwide from New Museum in New York (2012), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012), and most recently in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016). His work has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, and Frieze magazine. Rafman is represented by Zach Feuer Gallery and lives and works in Montreal, Canada.
(b. 1993, CH) is an artist and writer. He holds a BA from the Glasgow School of Art and an M.Phil from the University of Cambridge. A staff contributor to Frieze magazine, he is currently researching altruistic amoebae and the erotics of technological interfaces. Exhibitions include PRAKSIS at Atelier Nord X, Oslo and Would you like help? at Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh. He lives in the UK.
All images Š Jon Rafman
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HIrOSHI OKAMOTO HIRoShI OKAMOtO HiROsHI OKAMOTo HIROShi OKAMOtO HIRosHI OKAMoTo HIROShi OKamOtO HiRosHI OKAMoTo HIROShI OKamOtO HIroSHI OKAMOTO HIROSHI OkamOtO HIRoSHI OKAMOTO HIROSHi OkaMOtO RECRuIT
I WaNt tO dIe By RUSSET LEDERMAN
In the transition from adolescence to adulthood, there are life experiences that are difficult, and anxiety-producing rites of passage: applying to university, moving from the family home, and finding a full-time job are a few of them. There is excitement, but there is also fear of the unknown and the potential for failure. With subtle variations within different cultural milieus, these milestones are rarely achieved without a degree of mental and social anguish. Twenty-somethings undergo enormous pressure as they undertake their first daunting steps towards emotional self-sufficiency and financial independence. In Japan, the process of finding one’s first job after university is rarely a simple task. Each year, over half a million students graduate from university and enter the Japanese job market. The uncertainties and repeated rejections associated with securing employment in a sought-after Japanese corporation is a coming-of-age ritual that can at times feel like job seekers are hitting their heads against a massive and unyielding wall – competition is stiff, frustration is high and failure looms large. Hiroshi Okamoto, a young photographer from Tokyo, explores the complex social and emo-
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tional narratives that frame anxietyproducing cultural exercises such as job hunting in his current photographic projects and recently released photobook, Recruit. By focusing on specific experiences to reveal universal themes, Okamoto highlights the complicated relationship between an individual and society at large. In 2013, Okamoto’s best friend in university, Yo Toshino, sent him an email with the words, ‘I want to die.’ Toshino, then in his third year, was beginning the multi-step Japanese job hunting practice known as shukatsu, and was feeling the enormous pressure and anxiety that overcomes the thousands of students who must engage in this process. Okamoto, a social science and anthropology student at the time, documented his friend’s unease in a series of photographs. Not quite sure how to present these images of a very personal yet universal life experience, Okamoto held on to them for several years while he worked as a film director for video productions and pursued a more editorial and traditional photographic direction. Okamoto knew he wanted to tell stories, but was uncertain of the appropriate format or visual style. Then in
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HIROShI OkAmOTO
RUSSET LEDERMAN
(b. 1990, JP) graduated from Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University with a degree in social science and anthropology in 2014. In 2016 he began freelance photography and was shortlisted for the The Anamorphosis Prize (2016) and Dummy Book Award ARLES (2016). His book Recruit was nominated for various awards, and he has exhibited at Seoul Lunar Photo Festival, South Korea and Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, Japan.
(b. 1961, US) is a media artist, writer and photobook collector who lives in New York. She teaches media art theory and writing at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She regularly writes on photobooks, including for the International Center of Photography’s Library Blog. She is a co-organiser of the 10X10 Photobooks project and has received awards and grants from Prix Ars Electronica and the Smithsonian American Art museum.
All images © Hiroshi Okamoto Image on page 185 © FUSOSHA Publishing Inc., Weekly Sankei Magazine, 25th Oct, 1978
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CLAUDE CAHUN MARCEL MOoRE CLAUDE CAHUN MarCeL mOOre CLAUDE CAHUN mARcEl MOoRE CLAUDE CAHUN MarCeL moOrE CLAUDE CAHUN mARCEL MOoRe CLAUDE CAHUN MarCel moOrE CLAUDE CAHUN mARcEL MOoRe CLAUDE CAHUN MarCeL moOrE CLAUDE CAHUN mARCEl MOoRE CLAUDE CAHUN MaRcEL MoOrE CLAUDE CAHUN mArCel mOoRE CLAUDE CAHUN MaRCEL MoOrE CLAUDE CAHUN mArceL mOoRe CLAUDE CAHUN MArcEl MoOrE CLAUDE CAHUN MARCeL moORe CLAUDE CAHUN MarCEl MOorE CLAUDE CAHUN MARceL moORe CLAUDE CAHUN MarCEl MOorE CLAUDE CAHUN mARCEL mOORe CLAUDE CAHUN MarCeL MOorE unTITlED
I’Ll Be YOur MiRrOr By Kim Knoppers For a long time, the photographic selfportraits of Claude Cahun (1894-1954) were hidden deep within the forgotten vaults of art history. It was not until the late 1980s that her work was seen with fresh eyes. French writer François Leperlier dedicated a large part of his life’s work to Cahun, writing her back into the story of art. Exhibitions in well-known museums such as the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1995) stimulated interest yet further, followed by a stream of feminists, gender scientists and gay rights activists who pored over her work. How could more than thirty years have passed after her death before interest in Claude Cahun was revived? And what, exactly, was the part played by Marcel Moore in the story? Claude Cahun was the sexually ambiguous pseudonym of Lucie Schwob, born in 1894 to an intellectual Jewish family in Nantes, France. In 1909 she met fellow teenager Suzanne Malherbe. Their connection was une recontre foudroyant: a lightning-strike. In their bedrooms, experimenting with different poses and costumes, they developed what would later become their iconography of gendered subjectivity. Eight years after that first encounter, Lucie’s father married Suzanne’s mother, which meant the young women were no longer just friends and lovers, but stepsisters as well. Lucie took the name Claude Cahun in 1917, whilst Suzanne published her own il-
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lustrations and photomontages under the name Marcel Moore. In 1922 the pair moved to Paris, where they were drawn into the vibrant artistic scene. They soon became involved with theatre and literature, with the surrealists and with the radical activism of the Contre Attaque group, founded by the father of surrealism, André Breton. This period of optimism ended abruptly in 1938. Cahun and Moore decided to move to the British island of Jersey in an attempt to escape the alarming rise of Fascism. It was a near fatal decision. The Channel Islands were the only part of Britain to be occupied by the Nazis. Cut off from their friends and acquaintances in Paris, the women spent their days forging documents. Eventually, they raised the suspicions of the German occupying authorities, who concluded that there was a large and influential resistance network on Jersey. In 1944, the two women were arrested and sentenced to death. Liberation came just in time, but due to ill-health, Cahun was unable to return to Paris. She died in 1954. Marcel Moore took her own life eighteen years later. The work that Claude Cahun made in the 1920s is often categorized as selfportraiture. In her images she performs different roles in various costumes, posing as a dandy, a boxer, a sailor or a diva. At times she assumes a female character, whilst elsewhere she looks more masculine or androgynous, her
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something of a national institution. Gender fluidity has become a marketing strategy, which surely suggests it is gradually gaining acceptance. Cahun and Moore were significantly ahead of their time, to the point that they would have struggled to find real acceptance anywhere. After a breathtaking introduction to the vibrant cultural milieu of Paris, their refusal to be confined to a fixed identity made Cahun and Moore increasingly elusive. They became an enigma. For too long, their intangible nature condemned them to one of art history’s many blind spots. Furthermore, within the progressive circles of surrealism, homosexuality was not as acceptable as we might imagine. This – coupled with the years they spent in Jersey isolated from Europe’s cultural hubs, the destruction of much of their work at the hands of the German occupier, as well as the current need for remarkable stories about the artist – perhaps answers the question as to why it took so long for their work to be evaluated afresh. Since Cahun was always the one in the photos and the one who expressed herself in writing, Marcel Moore’s place remains unjustifiably neglected to this day. The downside of the inclusion of Cahun and Moore in the canon of art history is that they have at last been firmly allocated a place in the kind of unambiguous narrative they themselves detested. Mea Maxima Culpa.
WHo WE ARE
CLAuDE CAhuN / MaRcel MooRe CLAUDE CAHUN (b. 1894, FR – d. 1954) and MARCEL MOORE (b. 1892, FR – d. 1972) were creative and romantic partners best known for their surrealist photographic portraits. Born Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe respectively, in 1920 they adopted gender neutral pseudonyms and moved from Nantes to Paris where they became involved in the surrealist and avant-garde movements. To escape Nazism, they moved permanently to Jersey in 1937 where they distributed anti-fascist propaganda – their equally powerful artistic and political actions were used to undermine an authority that they abhorred. Much of Cahun and Moore’s acclaim came posthumously, and multiple exhibitions have featured their work, including at Tate Modern, London (2001). Much of Cahun and Moore’s work is held by the Jersey Heritage archives. All images © The Jersey Heritage Collections
KIM KNOPPERS (b. 1976, NL) is an art historian (University of Amsterdam) and curator at Foam. Since 2011, she has worked on exhibitions by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Anne de Vries, Jan Hoek, Lorenzo Vitturi and Jan Rosseel to name but a few. Kim is founder of Artists’ Recipes which explores the intersection of art and food. She lives and works in Amsterdam and stays on a regular basis in Istanbul.
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LAURIE SIMMONS LaurIE SImMoNS LAURiE siMmOnS lAurIE SImMoNS LAURiE sIMmOnS lAuRIE SIMMONS LaURiE SiMMOnS LAurIE SImMONS laURiE siMmOnS lAURiE sIMMONS LAUrIE SIMMONS KigUruMi, DoLLeRs
A CaRnal MediUm By William J. Simmons Roland Barthes could be describing Laurie Simmons’ work when he said in 1981, ʻA sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.ʼ Though Simmons has been associated with a more conceptual critique of identity politics, her recent work is, in fact, a deeply corporeal commentary that is real enough to caress with our fingertips. There is a characteristic self-awareness in Simmons’s recent work that sets her apart from her colleagues that are associated with conceptual photography also known as ʻThe Pictures Generationʼ. Her understanding of identity and its relationship to the photographic medium has always been evolving, and each new series is a simultaneous extension of and departure from the last.
with colour film projections. Color Pictures (2007-2009), while containing no living models, features lifelike found images of women from pornographic magazines. Finally, in her most recent series exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York, Simmons photographs a diverse group of individuals with painted-on eyes over their closed eyelids. The body, in all its physicality, has always been important territory to Simmons, and to consider her a photographer of the inanimate is a misnomer.
For the series Kigurumi, Dollers, and How We See (2014), Simmons photographs real people in fantasy/fetish cosplay gear, expanding her focus on the living human body, tracing back to her Water Ballet/Family Collision (1980-1981) series, which dazzles with painterly swaths of naked bodies swimming in glorious maritime paradise and whose only competition might be Alfred Steiglitz’s beautiful bell peppers and sexy sand dunes. Similarly, Fake Fashion (1984-1985) combines statuesque female models
Keeping this relationship to the body and physicality in mind, we might understand Simmons’ new works depicting cosplay as occupying a space between photography, painting, and performance. All of the figures occupy multiple registers of space. In Brunette/Red Dress/Standing Corner (2014) the model places her hands on adjacent sections of the wall, delineating a space with her body, just as the photograph delineates a space with its viewfinder. We might assume this room originally belonged to a little boy, now all grown up. Adorned with tiny race cars, the tattered room is at odds with the latex perfection of the female ʻbody.ʼ Similarly, Brunette, Black Dress, Orange Room (2014) finds its punctum in the subject’s gloved hand that grasps the wall. She tells us that this is her photograph as much as it is Simmons’. Moreover, her shadow is doubled and thereby deepens the
WHo WE ARE
more on page 233 >>
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LAuRIE SImmOnS
WILLIAM J. SIMMONS
(b. 1949, US) has had solo exhibitions at galleries including MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden; Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Germany; The Jewish Museum, New York. Her work was featured in The Pictures Generation, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1974) and various other group exhibitions worldwide. In 2018, Simmons will have a traveling retrospective originating at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. In 2006 she wrote and directed a short film, The Music of Regret, and her first feature film, My Art, recently premiered at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival.
(b. 1992, US) is a lecturer in art history at the City College of New York and a Ph.D. student in art history and women's studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of numerous essays, reviews, chapters, and features for a variety of international publications. Simmons also serves as the art editor for CRUSHfanzine.
All images © Laurie Simmons, courtesy Salon 94
WHo WE ARE
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Colophon ISSUE #46, WHO WE ARE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Marloes Krijnen CREATIVE DIRECTOR Pjotr de Jong (Vandejong)
240 FRONT COVER Yellow Hair/Red Coat/ Snow/Selfie, 2014 © Laurie Simmons, courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Marcel Feil, Joseph Gergel, Hinde Haest, Kim Knoppers, Mirjam Kooiman, Russet Lederman, Elisa Medde, MANAGING EDITOR Alessandro Michele, Colin Elisa Medde Pantall, William Simmons, Stanley Wolukau-Wanamb EDITORIAL ASSISTANT wa, Gary Zhexi Zhang George H. King COPY EDITOR EDITORIAL INTERN Pittwater Literary Services: Grace Hardman Rowan Hewison EDITORS Marcel Feil, Pjotr de Jong Marloes Krijnen, Elisa Medde
ART DIRECTOR Isabelle Vaverka (Vandejong) DESIGN & LAYOUT Isabelle Vaverka, Dominiek Kampman (Vandejong) MAGAZINE MANAGEMENT Menno Liauw, Carla Groen, Matthijs Bakker, Dorothée Ramaekers TYPEFACES Haarlem AM by Adrien Menard, Arial, ZIGZAG by Benoît Bodhuin CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS AND ARTISTS Jacques-Aurélien Brun, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Salvi Danés, #Dysturb, Laura El-Tantawy, Mayumi Hosokura, Anouk Kruithof, Quentin Lacombe, Clément Lambelet, Matthew Leifheit, Namsa Leuba, Dana Lixenberg, Mike Lundgren, Amak Mahmoodian, Ari Marcopoulos , Izumi Miyazaki, Hiroshi Okamoto, Christian Patterson, Irina Popova, Jon Rafman, Charlie Rubin, Laurie Simmons
TRANSLATIONS Liz Waters SPECIAL THANKS Bruno Ceschel, Jennifer Chaput, Tereza Cuni, Olivia Dreisinger, Alissa Friedman, Milo Keller, Val Nelson, Fabienne Stephan, Alessio Vannetti PRINTING Grafisch Bedrijf Tuijtel Industriestraat 10 3371 XD HardinxveldGiessendam – NL PAPER Igepa Nederland B.V. Biezenwei 16 4004 MB Tiel – NL EDITORIAL ADDRESS Foam Magazine Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam – NL T +31 20 551 65 00 F +31 20 551 65 01 editors@foam.org
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© Photographers, authors, Foam Magazine BV, Amsterdam, 2016. All photographs and illustration material is the copyright property of the photographers and/or their estates, and the publications in which they have been published. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. Any copyright holders we have been unable to reach or to whom inaccurate acknowledgement has been made are invited to contact the publishers at magazine@foam.org. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo-copy, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publishers. Although the highest care is taken to make the information contained in Foam Magazine as accurate as possible, neither the publishers nor the authors can accept any responsibility for damage, of any nature, resulting from the use of this information. The production of Foam Magazine has been made possible thanks to the generous support of paper supplier Igepa Netherlands B.V.
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