This Tumblr doesnât get updated as much as it used to (because, Instagram. I'm @TheArtDictator) but I recommend a scroll through the archive if you're interested in art, art direction, photography, and random stuff about magazine design /// It goes back to 2011, when I was living in Moscow as art director of Russian Vogue (for the second time), and 2012 when I was art director of GQ India, living in Mumbai /// I spent eight years keeping an apartment in Paris, and blogging about art /// Nowadays Iâve mostly given up travel (bad for the planet), but am still exploring creativity, art, ideas and (occasionally) shoes.
How to save your brain from being eaten by AI (maybe): keep a sketchbook
At the beginning of May I started bookmarking photographers who are using AI in interesting ways, to add to my Instagram collection of digital art references (#artdirectionneversleeps). Later that month I did my own first experiments using NightCafe to visualise ideas for a client. It was entertaining and frustrating, partly because of my lack of prompt skills, and partly because the "styles" you could apply to your "artwork" looked exactly like bad fantasy art from the 1980s.
That's just three months. From AI being a "what?" to becoming a completely logical, natural part of the image-making process, for at least some parts of the creative industries. The speed of change is head-spinning. And this is just the beginning.
Meanwhile, also in May, I was teaching at CNC on a really fun module about Brand Identity Design. Part of this involved the students keeping a sketchbook, to explore and develop their ideas. One of my lectures was about WHY people keep sketchbooks, and I illustrated several points with quotes from designers, architects and artists, and pages from my own sketchbooks from waaaaay back in the day.
Because WBITD, when I was an art student, I kept sketchbooks constantly. Not only was it a course requirement, for me it was also a way to stave off boredom and depression: it's hard to think negative thoughts when your brain is absorbed in analysing the curves of a hand or a coffee cup or a flower. When my best friend and I used to Interrail around Italy, I would draw our cafe tables and the local streets, and we'd get rewarded with extra drinks and desserts by kindly waiters.
Somewhere around the mid 90s I gave up sketching, partly because life got more hectic, and partly because smartphones got invented. When Emma and I started the BID course this summer, it had been a very long time indeed since I cracked open a sketchbook. And, erm, even though I did buy one â a lovely, spiral-bound, hard covered book with wonderful heavyweight paper, from Seawhite of Brighton â it took me another few months to start using it.
Two things pushed me into finally starting: firstly, it's #drawugst and I thought I should try a drawing a day, every day, during August. I started on Tuesday, August 1st, with a graphite pencil sketch of my aloe plant. I did it in semi-darkness, around 9pm, and my hand-eye coordination felt a but rusty, but following the heavy curves of the plant was satisfying.
On Wednesday I drew fallen agapanthus blossoms, playing with coloured marker pens (of which I have a ridiculously huge collection, almost never used). This was a reminder of the importance of not trying to control the end result while you're sketching. Because you just can't.
Yesterday evening I scribbled our messy after-dinner table. I used the graphite pencil, a Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth charcoal pencil, and an Edding 1225 calligraphy pen â and blackberries. The fruit, not the redundant communication device. Blackberry juice is a fabulous art material â it gives this beautiful purple inky result, and it's such a pleasure to smear all over the paper. I'd picked the berries earlier this evening on Wormwood Scrubs, just to add to the satisfaction of the whole experience. (And this morning I made almond milk smoothies with the rest of them.)
The other thing which made me finally restart a sketchbook after all this time is AI. I can see that it is just going to get bigger, more powerful, and more indispensable in my industry. I'm not going to worry about losing my job to a bot (I don't have "a job", anyhow), but I am concerned about what it will do to our creativity.
When you use one tool extensively it starts to train your brain, you develop habits and shortcuts. It's one thing to have tricks for making the most of Photoshop, or to have routines when you set up an InDesign document. But when you're trying to generate ideas you need to keep an open mind. To look at things from different angles. To look again, look harder. Try wacky ideas. Draw with your food. Stick things onto the pages. Doodle. Take a line for a walk. Write notes to self. Be creative. Be messy. Be human.
âYou had to be thereâ: in conversation with Albert Watson for Vogue CS, April 2023
Carmen DellâOrefice photographed by Albert Watson, Vogue CS, April 2023
âYou had to be there,â says Albert Watson. The legendary Scottish photographer is talking me through his shoot with the every-bit-as-legendary Carmen DellâOrefice, the original supermodel, who makes her Vogue CS debut this month at the tender age of 91.
In one particular picture, Carmen, statuesque in opera gloves and giant shades, appears to be rising like an Art Deco Venus out of a red and white mosaic cloud, yards of Lever Couture dress pooling below her. How, I want to know, did he make her look so â well, so tall? âThereâs a ledge that sheâs standing on at the back of the elevator,â Albert explains â âwe shot in a freight elevatorâ â next to the makeup area at the photographerâs studio in New York. Despite the fact that she is âvery fragile: two people had to escort her onto the set, if sheâs standing for any more than five minutes she gets vertigo,â Carmen remains, clearly, the eternal, consummate professional. âOnce she was on the set,â Watson continues, âonce that flash went, she [said] to herself, âOk Carmen, pull yourself together, letâs go!â She would laugh, give a little something [special] for every shot.â She may not have been actually levitating, but some kind of magic appears to have been happening. Not a gesture, not a moment was wasted. âThere were sometimes just five frames â click, click, click, click â done.â
The very idea of a nonagenarian with vertigo posing in dark glasses and couture several feet off the ground, in an elevator, is dizzying, and Watson is candid about the challenges. Early ideas discussed with the team in Prague included a shoot with a Surrealist theme. The immense depth of Watsonâs knowledge, his decades of experience â not to mention his great gift for storytelling â are evident as he explains to me, in detail, how a Surrealist-influenced shoot would work, how the model would move, how long the shots would take, how the photographer would conduct the sitting. He mentions the Vogue masters Horst and Erwin Blumenfeld, as well as Welsh theatrical photographer and set designer Angus McBean. But then: âI had a coffee with Carmen a week [before the shoot]⊠She is beautiful, people looked at her as she left the coffee shop⊠[but] she is fragile,â and he knew that this shoot needed to go in a different direction. âAs far as conceptualising it, I knew that my energy was best served to pour energy onto Carmen, to make her feel good about the shooting. If I had a 20-year-old model I could pour my energy into the concept â but you have to accept this is Carmen, a 91-year-old, and thatâs kind of remarkable.â And, in the end? âIt was fabulous!â Albert says, warmly. âShe is a wonderful personâ â as well as a part of fashion history. He describes the project as âphotographing somebody from another era, even before my time. She pointed out that when I first picked up a camera she had already been working as a model for twenty years â and Iâve been a photographer for fifty years!â
Albert Watson is 81, and has shot over a hundred Vogue covers. He started working with the magazine in 1976 (Carmen appeared on her first Vogue cover, aged 15, in 1946). Born in Edinburgh, Watson retains a soft Scottish accent, despite having lived in the US since the seventies. âI started off at art college as a graphic designer,â he says. Impressively, the fact that he was born blind in one eye seems never to have held him back. âAs a craft subject I had two years of photography.â He then spent two years studying film at the Royal College of Art, but it was photography which was to dominate his career. Early test sessions for Max Factor in Los Angeles brought him to the attention of magazines, including Vogue, and his first celebrity image, of Alfred Hitchcock holding a dead goose for the Christmas 1973 issue of Harper's Bazaar, set the stage for a career in A-list portraiture. From Steve Jobs to Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger to Queen Elizabeth II, Watson has photographed many of the most famous faces of our times, as well as hundreds of actors, musicians and other celebrities.
Going back to the Vogue CS cover story, âI approached the shooting like it was portraiture,â says Albert. âMy preparation in this case was that it had to be minimal, treating Carmen as a celebrity [rather than] a model, [where we] catch glimpses of the fashion.â I mention that some of the shots have a feel of Irving Penn, some of the styling, the hats and fascinators, reminds me of Lilian Bassman photographs. Albert doesnât disagree. âYou could sense, when you photographed Carmen, a little bit of a thread going all the way backwards to the 1990s, the 1980s, the seventies, the sixties and into the fifties. You could feel that [history] from her, the way she projects it.â
Carmen DellâOrefice photographed by Albert Watson, Vogue CS, April 2023
As well as shooting portraits, fashion, and covers for magazines including GQ, Rolling Stone and Details, Watson has photographed major ad campaigns, directed TV commercials, and shot film posters and album covers. He also keeps up a steady stream of personal work, including still life and even landscape photography. Youâve shot so many different kinds of subjects, I say: do you have different mindsets for different kinds of photography? Do you feel differently when youâre shooting different subjects? âI do!â This is a good moment to point out that Albert is also an educator, a teacher of photography students. His Masters of Photography series covers everything from âThe importance of casting and hair & makeupâ to âPhotographing sand dunes.â He tells me about taking time off between fashion shoots to travel in the north of his native Scotland, which in turn leads a fascinating discussion of his methodology when it comes to preparing and conceptualising photo shoots.
âIâm not a landscape photographer,â he says, âbut I always wanted to spend six weeks just doing landscapes, no faces in front of me. [In 2013] I went to the Orkney Islands to do âportraitsâ of the standing stones there. I went to the Isle of Skye [with] a book of paintings by Degas.â While Degas is famous for his Impressionist studies of ballet dancers and jockeys, Watson took a book of his less well-known landscapes. âI was fascinated by the fact that he would paint a rather boring hill â if I was standing behind Degas and took a picture of it [with a camera] and showed it to you youâd go, âOk, itâs a picture of a hill,â whereas if you look at the Degas painting you say, âWow, what a beautiful painting.â The thing is that Degas is doing an interpretation of what he sees in front of him, and Iâm taking a picture⊠so I get an exact copy of whatâs in front of me.â
Watson talks about how two photographers shooting the same landscape may end up with the same image, whereas two painters rarely will. Heâs describing the need to push photography, beyond simply recording what is in front of the camera. âYou have to try and control the landscape,â he says, âdonât let the landscape dominate the final image.â Some of his endeavours seem almost like Buddhist meditations â spending three days, ten hours a day, photographing reflections caused by the wind on a Scottish loch, for instance. Or getting up every day at 4.30am to be on the road by 5.30am, when it was still dark, to do âa series of pictures in a beautiful kind of forest, using the headlights of the cars as lights going through the forest.â
Carmen DellâOrefice photographed by Albert Watson, Vogue CS, April 2023
Watsonâs landscape photography isnât simply an endurance test â even though âI chose October deliberately because the weather was bad!â He approaches it with as much professional preparation as any of his commissioned work: âI had two assistants with me, to make me very efficient, and able to quickly get up a mountain to take a picture, and quickly down.â He also uses it a way of reflecting deeply on the meaning of the images. âI wrote down a lot of things that were connecting landscapes to an emotional response.â On Skye he was musing on âLord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Victorian romantic paintingsâ and when I ask him about how he keeps track of all these ideas, all these concepts, projects, he replies, âIâm taking notes all the time. I have a diary with me, and Iâve a diary by my bedside. Sometimes I wake up in the morning with an idea, go to sleep get an ideaâŠâ He talks about jotting things in a little notebook â âLandseer [the nineteenth century English animal painter and sculptor], some of the German Romantic painters from the 1860s, 1880s.â
On Skye, he also spent time taking pictures of the landscape specifically to manipulate them later â âshooting for a computer,â as he calls it. In his eighties, Watson still has a strong interest in innovation, and is unfazed by technology. His Instagram account, @albertwatsonphotography, is beautifully curated (âmy son does that, he does a great jobâ) and has a strong following, but Watson is shrewd about the platform, well aware of what generates likes and what doesnât. âWith Instagram you have to be careful. Instagram is kind of a false reading of how popular your work is.â A combination of old and new, published and unpublished work, the account is also an educational tour through five decades of image-making, an excellent resource for photographers, students, designers and photography lovers alike. I ask him to talk a bit more about his own resources, and what kind of advice he offers to younger generations today. Unsurprisingly, Albert has a wealth of brilliant insights on the topic.
âI always say to younger photographers: âpreparation,ââ he begins. âThey immediately think, âmust charge the batteries in my camera!â But itâs nothing to do with that. Itâs conceptual preparation⊠When Iâm preparing a shooting, Iâll go through a lot of books.â Watson admits, âthe one thing that amazes me that young photographers donât use nowadays⊠[is] books.â He talks about how books can be a source of ideas and inspiration, even if you end up taking things in a different direction than originally planned. A book is like a road map, but you donât have to follow it faithfully: âItâs like you head out from London to go to Cornwall and you end up in Wales â the important thing is the book gets you out of London!â
His book collection is âabout 30% photography, 70% art. That is a major difference,â he points out. âYouâd imagine for a photographer itâd be 92% photography. But there are books on art, architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, books on the Maya, the Aztecs⊠a complete collection of [seventeenth century English architect] Vanbrugh drawings, Michelangelo drawings...â With thousands of volumes at his disposal â âI have five libraries in my apartmentâ â itâs also important not to get overwhelmed. Or overburdened on set. Albertâs trick is to use the iPhone to snap images from his library and collect them in albums on the phone to use as reference, especially when travelling. Itâs an elegant solution, as practical as it is contemporary.
Watson himself has been the subject of several books, from the educational (Creating Photographs, from the Masters of Photography series), to the spectacular (Kaos, a dazzling career overview published by Taschen in 2017 in a limited edition priced at ÂŁ2,000). His work has also been featured in catalogues from scores of exhibitions. Watson, The Maestro, at Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul Arts Center through March 30, 2023, is his first retrospective in Korea and his largest exhibition to date in Asia. Meanwhile, those hauntingly beautiful images from the Isle of Skye can be seen in an online exhibition at the virtual gallery, CameraWork.de.
I ask if there any books he would recommend? âOne of the best things for photography students, and design students,â he says, âis photography catalogues from [auction houses] Christieâs, Sothebyâs and Phillips â Phillips does nice big onesâ (as both a photography lecturer and former Phillips art director, Iâm delighted to hear this.) âYou can buy these things [on Ebay] going back fifty years,â Albert points out. âFor thirty bucks youâve got a thousand images by classic photographers! It's a great teaching tool.â
Our interview is nearly over, thereâs just time for one last question, so I ask what motivates him â to teach, to experiment, to plan, to shoot â âWhat inspires you to keep doing what youâre doing?â Albert laughs. âIâm addicted to photography!... I always found the technical side of photography a pain in the neck, so I was never enthusiastic about that, but I did realise that if you want to be a photographer you have to have to bite the bullet, do your homework. Iâm glad I did, because working hard on things like lighting, it opens creative doors for you. You can solve things quicker if you know how to light.â
âYves Saint Laurent: Behind the Scenes of Haute Couture in Lyonâ
For the fashion lover emerging from lockdown after long months of style sensory deprivation, what could be more exciting than a new exhibition on⊠the history of textile manufacture?
How about two exhibitions on the history of textile manufacture?
Chintz: Cotton in Bloom, opened in May at Londonâs Fashion and Textile Museum, and I took my students to visit as soon as in-person teaching allowed.
For many of my generation, âchintzâ was a dirty word â entirely thanks to a 1996 ad for Ikea. The ad played on the notion that British homes were full of old-fashioned furnishings upholstered in shiny floral-printed cotton, and urged people to âChuck out your chintz.âÂ
I remember as Art Director of House & Garden having to get over my floral fabric phobia (chintziest moment: directing a photoshoot in a Nicky Haslam-designed house where just drawing the curtains would give you hay fever). But the whole idea of âchintzâ in fashion still sounds, well, funny. This exhibition was organised by the Fries Museum in the Netherlands, whose curators were presumably never scarred by jingles like âthat flowery trimmage is spoiling our imageâ and who have taken a very comprehensive approach to the history of the fabric. The display includes 150 items, and lots of facts. My students and I dutifully looked at every 18th-century sun hat and pair of baby mittens, but I think itâs fair to say we came away underwhelmed.
This wasnât because the exhibits are unimpressive, or even boring â theyâre not. But traditional, conventional, and, most of all, static museum presentations like this one are, often, very boring.
So far so⊠boring? However, this exhibition is anything but.
It opens with something quite unexpected: a set of 11 paper dolls made in 1953 by the teenage Yves, growing up in Oran. He cut photos of famous models out of fashion magazines, and made paper wardrobes for each. He came up with collection âprogramsâ for imaginary fashion shows, listing the names of his models, the names of the looks, and the fabric manufacturers for each item. The dolls are charming and their wardrobes are beautifully drawn, but the fact that a 17-year-old boy would consider who should manufacture the fabrics is really exceptional.
Next to the paper dolls is a display of photographs of the grown-up Saint Laurent at work, surrounded by rolls of fabric and his muses, mannequins and colleagues. In an image by Patrice Habans (below) from 1978, YSL is pictured in his showroom with a group of models draped in plaids. The material unfurls onto the floor and the designer props up another roll. Loulou de la Falaise watches from the sidelines, everyone is smiling â clearly the models (Nicole Dories, Mounia Orosemane, Kirat Young and Dothi Dumonteuil) are enjoying themselves, and Yves is in his element.
Itâs notable how this exhibition reveals the importance of personal relationships in Saint Laurentâs practice. In the picture above, the model is Kirat Young, one of the designerâs favourite muses, who first arrived in his studio in 1976 as a 19-year-old student from New Delhi. This photograph, from 1982, is by Bettina Rheims, and you can almost see the designerâs mind at work, looking past Kiratâs padded jacket and fringed pants to the polka dot muslin couture dress of his imagination.
« La haute couture, câest la matiĂšre » said Yves Saint Laurent â âhaute couture IS the material.â He also claimed he could make a dress with his eyes closed â âthatâs how well I know fabric.â The exhibition lovingly and meticulously presents the production processes behind the dresses, from initial sketches to choice of material, and the âbible pagesâ with fabric swatches and technical information. Displayed alongside are the final creations, like the red dress below, taffeta by Bucol, look 51 of the spring-summer 2000 collection.
One part of the exhibition shows pages of fabric swatches â « tirelles » â from colour books which the studio assembled over the years. These, like the rest of the exhibition, are shown against black painted walls and the effect is quite magical.
The black walls are a simple but brilliant design feature of this exhibition. They make everything sing, especially the fabrics themselves, which catch the light and draw the eye, especially in the last room, where you can read about technological developments by companies like Abraham and Brochier â or just gaze at how Yves Saint Laurent harnessed that technology to make dream dresses.
Sneakers Unboxed: Studio to Street, at the Design Museum, London
âSneakers Unboxedâ is a brilliant name for an exhibition. It cleverly plays on the YouTube phenomenon of videoing yourself unpacking (unboxing) stuff, particularly tech or fashion items, live-reviewing and examining the product in detail in the process. In the 15 or so years since they first started to appear, unboxing videos have become a wildly popular and surreally lucrative online trend. Children unboxing toys is one huge subgenre, but trainer unboxing is right up there. If you need an intro, I recommend gamer Matthew âNadeshotâ Haag unboxing a pair of the Nike Air Max 97 Satan Shoes, made in collaboration with Lil Nas X. Launched in March this year, the initial release of 666 pairs (of course) sold out in less than a minute.
Sneakers are also an extremely lucrative industry, and one where the resale value of goods is often higher than the original price tag. One exhibit in the Design Museum explains StockX, the online marketplace and trading platform, which tracks the growth and changing trends of the secondary sneaker market. The most expensive launch of 2020, for instance, was the Jordan x Dior Jordan I Retro High, originally retailing at $2,000 but now valued at over $15,000.
Sneakers, ditto, have in recent years become wildly popular. Everyone wears them. 15 years ago summer footwear still meant sandals. For fashionistas, casual comfort was ballet flats. In 2021, whether youâre wearing a long dress, a tiny skirt, or pants of any kind, youâre almost inevitably finishing your look with trainers. This exhibition, therefore, has universal relevance, and it presents a bit of something for everyone.
Thereâs an introductory section including top ten sneaker-producing countries (number one: China) and top ten sneaker-consuming countries (number two: China). There is a section about the history of sneakers and music, including clips from the 2005 film Just for Kicks where Run DMC talk about how their 1986 hit âMy Adidasâ became the first endorsement deal between a musical act and a sportswear brand.
And there are sneakers. Lots and lots of sneakers.
Now, the thing with sneakers is you want to get up close with them. You want to see the details of stitching and fabric. Especially with new technological developments in materials, and examples like the Adidas x Parley Project (2015), below, a shoe made from illegal deep-sea gill nets and plastic waste collected by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
You need to get close.
You want to see into their soles.
Which, unfortunately, is not so easy when everything is displayed in glass cabinets and some of those cabinets are quite deep. Youâre looking at something thatâs comparatively small, placed up to a metre away, there is glare and reflection and the lighting is not fabulous (I filtered the hell out of my pictures before posting them to Instagram.) While the curators have put together a great collection of items to show, Iâm not sure theyâve actually done a great job of showing them.
Adidas IKEA Ultraboot (2017) customised by Edmond Looi
I had a similar sensation walking through Unboxed. Thereâs lots to look at, but itâs not easy to view, and you come away dissatisfied. In fact, I came away ready to buy the book â assuming thereâd be a big, glossy exhibition catalogue where one could see close-ups of the shoes and read about them in a more leisurely fashion. However, the accompanying book is not that kind of book. Itâs a collection of quotes from sneaker designers â which Iâd be interested in except the quotes are things like, âI find myself more inspired when I interact with other creatives and share ideas,â âI am mostly inspired by the things around me. By the ordinary processes of everyday life and how we interact with the products we own and love.â Hmm.
An exhibition is a show and tell. Youâre telling a story and showing artefacts to help with the telling. This makes sense if your exhibition is about a cultural phenomenon, such as, say, Alice in Wonderland (full disclosure: not seen it yet). You could do an exhibition about a general history of shoes, present it in vitrines and as long as the lighting was good it should work fine. However, sometimes the artefacts are the story. And an exhibition about sneakers quite definitely falls into this category. As I said earlier, you need to be able to examine the details, up close and from different angles â the way a talented YouTuber unboxes their goodies.
If I were the Design Museum, next time Iâm planning an exhibition about footwear design Iâd consider doing it digitally, using AR to enhance the experience. You could still have the physical display, but adding augmented reality would allow the visitor to really get into the shoes (literally â why not use try-on technology like the Wanna Kicks app?) You could examine the materials and construction of the pieces, and have the creators/designers/collectors talking about their passion in pop-out videos.Â
J.H. Lartigue (1894-1986) got his first camera aged seven, and took pictures of friends, family, and sporting events all his life. But he made a living â quite a successful one â as a painter. It wasnât until he was 69 years old that his early photographs were seen by Charles Rado of the Rapho agency, and John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. Szarkowski arranged an exhibition of his work, Life magazine published the images in 1963, and Lartigueâs photography career took off.Â
(The portrait of Lartigue below is by Alice Springs, shot in 1984, when he was 90 and she was 61.)
June used the professional name Alice Springs because Helmut âthought one Newton in the family was enough. And if I didnât succeedâŠâ In the highly entertaining Mrs Newton, published by Taschen in 2004, June describes how a fortune teller predicted she would âalways be surrounded by cameras, but never be in front of them.â This exhibition shows to just what extent that was true. Part of the show is devoted to portraits of photographers â Lartigue himself, the brothers Javier and Valentin Vallhonrat, David Bailey, Richard Avedon, Brassai â and most of them also feature the photographerâs husband.
Here he is, clowning with Bruce Weber. There, keeping a straight face whilst Bailey gropes around in Don McCullinâs pants. In a well-known self-portrait, Springsâ own face is hidden by the camera lens while her husband looms beatifically behind.
What stands out about these shots is the sheer fun the Newtons seem to have together. No matter how many statuesque nudes heâs surrounded by, itâs June for whom Helmut dances, and giggles, and gets his kit off.Â
The other thing that stands out is Helmut Newtonâs nose â a bulbous cartoon schnozzle thatâs impossible to ignore, catching the light as it invariably does, and overshadowing other elements of the picture, sometimes literally. Once noticed it is impossible to un-notice. After a while, you start to see it as a sly in-joke: one of the fashion worldâs most in-demand photographers, the images Helmut Newton created were erotically super-charged â but Alice/June presents him as Cyrano de Bergerac. He may have had the worldâs most beautiful women naked at his feet, but his wife could still show him as a figure of fun.
About the only portrait in this exhibition where Helmut Newtonâs nose is not front and centre is the picture of him in hospital in a neck brace, in 2004, following his car crash at the Chateau Marmont. Itâs a simple picture, with zero melodrama. But the angle says it all: jokeâs over.
The current show at MEP follows an earlier exhibition of Springsâ portraits, in 2012. Itâs a rather complicated set-up, bringing together work from several different parts of her career. As well as the black-and-white portraits, including her photographer friends and acquaintances, there is a set of portraits of New York socialites, all of whom look more or less like hell (actually you CAN be too rich and too thin.) A collection of celebrity portraits from the 80s and 90s seems slightly random, and a room of street photography from California in the 1980s really doesnât add anything to the show. Better just to enjoy the moments with âHelâ and friends, and June Newtonâs life-long love affair with her husband.
Walking into the Zanele Muholi exhibition at Tate Modern is like discovering another country.
In 2017 Muholiâs ongoing self-portrait series, Somnyama Ngonyama/Hail the Dark Lioness, was exhibited in Londonâs Autograph Gallery. In press reviews and posters on the tube that autumn, the images were unmissable and unmistakeable: stark black and white photographs of an impassive face crowned with Brillo pads or clothes pegs, festooned with vacuum cleaner hoses. At the time, Autograph wrote, the artist: âuses her body as a canvas to confront the politics of race and representation⊠Gazing defiantly at the camera, Muholi challenges the viewerâs perceptions while firmly asserting her cultural identity on her own terms: black, female, queer, African.â
Fast forward to 2020, and Tate Modernâs major Zanele Muholi exhibition. Visiting hours at the museum flicker in and out of existence as we navigate COVID lockdowns â now you can come! No, wait, sorry, you canât. Try rebooking for a monthâs time.
When I finally squeaked in, in early December, I expected more Dark Lionesses. I had a vague idea that Zanele Muholi was a bit like a South African Cindy Sherman.
I was wrong.
This exhibition shows the breadth of Muholiâs practice, of which the self-portraits are just one strand. The range and energy of the work is astounding. Especially given that in 2012 their studio was burgled and five years of work on hard drives was stolen.
Another mental adjustment: Muholiâs pronouns are they/them/theirs.
Born in Umlazi, South Africa, in 1972, at the height of Apartheid, Zaneleâs father died when they were a baby and their mother, Bester, a domestic worker, had to leave her eight children for employment in a white household. Zanele was brought up by extended family. They started working as a hairdresser, then studied photography at Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, graduating in 2003, and going on to be awarded their MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University in Toronto in 2009.
On returning to South Africa they started to document the lives of the LGBTQI+ community.
Aftermath (2004)
The exhibition opens with a group of deceptively gentle images. In the first, Aftermath (2004), a torso is cropped from waist to knees, hands modestly clasped in front of Jockey shorts, a huge scar running down the personâs right leg almost like a piece of body art. In another, Ordeal (2003), hands wring out a cloth in an enamel basin of water placed on a floor. A third image shows a cropped, seated figure, again waist to thighs, hands folded in their lap, plastic hospital ties around their wrists. These pictures have a softness and beauty which completely belies the fact that their subjects are all survivors of sexual violence and âcorrective rapeâ.
As the caption to the last picture, Hate crime survivor I, Case number (2004) explains, âCorrective rape is a term used to describe a hate crime in which a person is raped because of their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. The intended consequence of such acts is to enforce heterosexuality and gender conformity.â This horrific practice is by no means unique to South Africa, but the term seems to have originated there â feminist activist Bernedette Muthien used it during an interview with Human Rights Watch in 2001 â and its effects on the community resonate throughout this exhibition.
Ordeal (2003)
They donât, however, dominate. While the exhibition starts by showing the evils of intolerance of gender nonconformity, Muholi goes on to reclaim, elevate and celebrate that same nonconformity.
With Being (2006 â ongoing) we move on to photographs of naked bodies entwined â again tightly cropped, again soft black and white, but now without outside interference. They are sensual, personal, and owned. A series of portraits of two female lovers, Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta (2007) switches to colour and full figures. The couple sit entwined, laughing: they kiss, and bathe side by side standing in an enamel basin, in a warm, defiant echo of the scene in Ordeal (2003) across the room.
Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext.2, Lakeside, Johannesburg (2007)
The series Brave Beauties, started in 2014, is âa series of portraits of trans women, gender non-conforming and non-binary people. Many of them are also beauty pageant contestants.â The queer beauty pageant is many things: a celebration â and redefinition â of beauty, a declaration of independence by contestants, a challenge to âheteronormative and white supremacist cultures,â and an attempt, as Muholi puts it, âto change mind-sets in the communities [the contestants] live in, the same communities where they are most likely to be harassed or worse.â
Melissa Mbambo, Durban, South Beach (2017). Melissa Mbambo is a trans woman and beauty queen, Miss Gay South Africa 2017
Roxy Msizi Dlamini, Parktown, Johannesburg (2018)
Akeelah Gwala, Durban (2020)
These portraits are made collaboratively, Muholi and the subjects choosing clothing, location and poses together. Some of them, like the picture of Roxy Msizi Dlamini (2018) have the quality of a classic glamorous studio shot. Others, like Akeeleh Gwala, Durban (2020), posing in a bikini against a scruffy brick wall in what seems to be a deserted brick alleyway, are a reminder of the vulnerability of the subject. Akeelah Gwalaâs âTestimonyâ in the exhibition catalogue says: âI am 24 years old. I am a transgender woman. Growing up was very difficult because your parents think this is a boy⊠I was raped when I was 16 years oldâŠâ The rapist, a well-known pastor, threatened Akeelahâs family, forcing them out of their home. Akeelah refers to Muholi as âSir Muholiâ and says, âI have taken part in several beauty pageants. I perform because as a Brave Beauty, it is important to be visible and make others know about us and respect us as human beings.â
Miss Lesbian I-VII, Amsterdam (2009)
The theme of beauty pageants also features in the series of self-portraits Miss Lesbian I-VII, Amsterdam (2009), where Muholi casts themself as a beauty queen, an early identification with the wider community prefiguring Brave Beauties. The 2009 series brings together several of Muholiâs themes: the beauty pageant and the fashion/fashion magazine world; who gets to perform and who gets to watch; who gets to choose what beauty means? And, as an aside that may sound trivial but isnât, kitchen utensils as headgear.
As the exhibition unfolds, we discover other projects. Muholi describes themselves as a visual activist, and they have a large network of collaborators, including the collective Inkanyiso (âLightâ or âIlluminateâ in isiZulu), a non-profit organisation focused on queer visual activism. We see images documenting marches and protests, weddings and funerals, and âAfter Tearsâ â gatherings held after burials to celebrate the life of the lost loved one.
Nathi Dlamini at the After Tears of Muntu Masombukaâs funeral, KwaThema, Springs, Johannesburg (2014)
Death is a constant presence in Muholiâs community and work. The largest space in this exhibition is given to Faces and Phases (2006 â ongoing), a collection of portraits â 500, and counting. The images âcelebrate, commemorate and archive the lives of Black lesbians, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals.â People appear more than once. Some spots on the walls are empty, marking a portrait yet to be taken or a participant no longer there. One wall is dedicated to those who have passed away.
Not only is this a powerful and moving project, itâs an extraordinarily beautiful set of pictures. As are the last works in the show, the series that started in 2012: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness.
In this work, Muholi has darkened their skin and whitened their eyes, and composed the picture in the manner of a classical, perfectly-lit studio portrait, posing with found objects as âcostumeâ â a footstool as a helmet, say. There is so much to unpick in these images â references to colonialism, Apartheid, to the politics of race and representation, to femininity and âwomenâs workâ. Â Muholi presents us with a kaleidoscope of views of injustice, equal parts beautiful and brutal. The photographs were created in different parts of the world, at different times, combining what could almost be witty accessorising with intense cultural and political commentary.
Quinso, The Sails, Durban (2019)
The intellectual focus of every picture is slightly different. Zamile, KwaThema (2016) shows Muholi draped in a striped blanket, as used in South African prisons during Apartheid. In Quinso, The Sails, Durban (2019) Muholiâs hair is adorned with silvery Afro combs, a symbol of African and African diaspora cultural pride. In Nolwazi II, Nuoro, Italy (2015) their hair is stuffed with pens â a reference to the âpencil testâ whereby, under Apartheid, if a pencil pushed into a personâs hair fell out they were âclassified as whiteâ.
Nolwazi II, Nuoro, Italy (2015)
As mentioned above, Muholi calls themselves a visual activist rather than an artist â though galleries, like Tate Modern, might beg to disagree. Walking through this exhibition, I came away with the impression that their work is on the intersection of art and documentary photography â but also that everything is documentary: everything is story telling, and bearing witness, and the place where âdocumenting the communityâ and âexpressing oneself as an artistâ is continually blurred.
Maybe itâs not just like discovering a new country: maybe Zanele Muholi is showing us a whole new world.
Zanele Muholi is at Tate Modern until May 31, 2021
From the archives:Â HĂŽtel de lâIndustrie in Saint-Germain-des-PrĂšs is a particularly civilised setting in which to tell a particularly grim story. This autumn the HĂŽtel hosted Narciso Contrerasâ Libya, A Human Marketplace, winner of the 2016 Carmignac Photojournalism Award. It is a powerful and deeply disturbing set of images, about a horrific â and ongoing â situation.
Having seen the exhibition a few weeks earlier, I went back during Paris Photo to hear Contreras talk about his work in Libya. As it happened, that Saturday morning two presentations had been scheduled, but only a couple of us turned up for the first one. Contreras politely offered to give us a private tour, but that seemed a bit self-indulgent, so we went off for coffee and rejoined the crowds later.
Soft-spoken and courteous, Contreras has a very deliberate manner. Though his English is perfect (heâs Mexican), he takes great care about what he says and how he says it. In 2013 Contreras won the Pulitzer prize for his photography documenting the war in Syria. But Google him and the stories that come up first are about a scandal: in 2014, Contreras edited one of his images, photoshopping a video camera out of the corner of a Syrian battle scene. Contreras himself told the agency about the retouching, and it was hardly akin to faking news that could sway a presidential election, but rules are rules (or at least they were back in 2014) and the photographer was dropped by Associated Press.
Contreras has been covering conflict in Southern Asia and the Middle East since 2010. As well as Syria, he has covered ethnic strife in Myanmar, the military coup in Egypt and the war in Yemen. The galleries on his website testify to his intense commitment to reporting human suffering.
In 2015 Contreras started a project to document migrants travelling through Libya to Europe.
Libya has the longest stretch of African coastline facing Europe â specifically, facing Italy and Greece â which makes it a natural departure point for travellers. Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa all make their way through the country towards the Mediterranean. But post-Gaddafi Libya is, to put it mildly, a lawless place. Two governments fight for control. Warring militias and Islamic State supporters terrorise the country, and the detention centres where travellers end up. The detention centres themselves are filthy, overcrowded, and violent: there is no safety for women or the vulnerable. In the course of documenting all this, Contreras realised that refugees are being bought and sold by the militias.
âWho buys them?â I asked, dumbly.
âPeople in Europe.â
A section of the exhibition shows mentally ill women in Surman detention centre, near the coast. One particularly harrowing image is of a young woman who had been in detention for two years, âpresumably a rape victim,â with an abortion scar on her stomach. It was not clear whether her pregnancy happened in the detention centre or earlier.
There are views inside a detention compound: a close-up of another young woman, wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt, her hands ravaged by scurvy.
Another section shows dead bodies washed up on the shore, their boats capsized. More pictures are taken from inside a boat, just above the water level. Contreras managed to get close, figuratively and literally, to the people smugglers and local militia members, resulting in shockingly intimate pictures.
Contreras has made three trips to Libya so far for this project. The exhibition is coming to London in 2017, he told me (Saatchi Gallery, May.)
The problem for the viewer with work like this is that it is a call to action â but what action? Faced with the scale of the horrors being carried out in Libya, and the fact that a 2015 UN-brokered political deal is having little or no effect, what can any individual do?
Well, stay informed, for a start. In September this year, Boris Johnson, talking about boat migration from Libya, said, "I think personally the boats should be turned back as close to the shore as possible so they don't reach the Italian mainland and that there is more of a deterrent.â Human Rights Watch said his views were âuninformed and inhumane.â Boris Johnson needs to see this exhibition â spread the word.
Libya, A Human Marketplace â Prix Carmignac www.narcisocontreras.photoshelter.com
November 9, 2020, a moment of magazine newsstand history: four leading British glossy fashion monthlies feature Black women performers on their covers.Â
Over the last couple of years Black representation on magazine covers broadly speaking has been creeping up, but progress is slow, especially among the long-established monthly glossies. In April 2018, Afua Hirsch reported in The Guardian: "Of 214 covers published by the 19 bestselling glossies last year [ie, 2017] only 20 featured a person of colour... The most diverse month was October, when two magazines showed a black model and one featured an Asian model on the cover.â
Admittedly the covers here are a mix of November and December issues, plus non-monthlies. But they were all on display at the same time and that is an important statement: itâs not just one or two covers â itâs all of them.
For decades, the received wisdom in the British publishing industry was that Black cover stars âdonât sell.â In the 90s I remember this phrase being trotted out the same way as âredheads donât sellâ or âgreen logos donât sellâ were â as matters of fact, not opinion. It came from the Marketing Department, the Publisher, the Editor herself. If the situation was, once in a while, lamented (a big âifâ), it was still accepted as gospel. Racial intolerance was assumed to be a reflection of the society we lived in â just like homophobia and sexism, fat-shaming and age discrimination.
And as a policy it was never challenged. Because the job of the cover was not to change the world, or even to fairly represent British society: it was to sell the magazine.Â
With the advent of digital, the decline of print sales, and the rise of social media, the function of the magazine cover began to change. Whereas a double page spread or 12-page fashion shoot doesnât work on an iPhone screen, a clever cover definitely does. With the right image, a memorable message, and well-considered design, your cover becomes a meme â shareable, quotable, famous. This means that nowadays, a cover is shorthand for your brand. It tells everyone who you are: your customers, advertisers, rivals, fans, critics.Â
All the same, no commercial magazine publisher or editor today chooses a cover subject for altruistic reasons (or out of guilt). They still want someone who will sell. Which brings us to the question of why the British media suddenly believes that Black women DO sell.Â
There are of course a variety of reasons, but the catalyst is surely British Vogue and Edward Enninful. Since taking over as Editor in Chief three years ago, Enninful has been a leading champion of diversity, in all areas but most noticeably on covers. He has also, noticeably, been good for the magazineâs sales and circulation. 2019 single (ie, not group) cover stars included Naomi Campbell, Lizzo, Jourdan Dunn and Zoe Kravitz. In February's Audit Bureau of Circulation report, in the 2019 Top Ten Womenâs Lifestyle section, Vogue was one of only two titles to increase circulation year on year. The other was Stylist, which is given away free.
And in June 2020, British Vogue had its most successful month in its online history, with over five million unique users. Â
Think of it like a maths equation:
diversity + digital communication = buzzÂ
buzz x repetition = changeÂ
Right now, towards the end of 2020, that change is finally becoming visible on newsstands. Finishing up with another quote from Afua Hirsch: âCovers matter. Those who appear on them are the ambassadors of beauty, success and commercial appeal. For those who scan magazine racks, the impression of whose faces are projected out on to a shop floor has a visceral impact â and the choices of whose faces those are reverberate, influencing others.â
Really pleased to be involved with this: the #newlookAD đ This month, all nine international editions of AD / Architectural Digest magazine have a new cover format and new logo đ Congratulations to the passionate and creative teams at AD China, @ad_magazine @ad_germany @ad_italia @ad_spain @admexico @adrussia @archdigestindia @admiddleeast đ A few shout outs đ @enricpastor and @ana.camus for the new logo â€ïžđđ€And top support from @greg.foster @heshamrabea @ashishsahi @oliverjahnad @eugeniamikulinaad @interiorseditor @julystern 𧥠#welovemagazines #printsnotdead #lovemyjob #condelife (at The Adelphi Building)
When youâve got a single Saturday afternoon in SĂŁo Paulo and you need to whittle the cityâs hundreds of art exhibitions, world-class museums and iconic architecture down to a manageable â and memorable â handful of visits, it helps to have expert guidance.Â
My expert, Casa Vogue Brazil Art Director Tammy Takenaka, was precise: âIMS and MASP.â
MASP (Museu de Arte de SĂŁo Paulo) was founded in 1947 and houses one of the worldâs great collections, of European as well as South American art. IMS (Instituto Moreira Salles), a few blocks north on Avenida Paulista, is a baby in comparison. Part of a non-profit cultural organisation founded in 1990 by philanthropist Walter Moreira Salles, with centres around Brazil, the institute opened in SĂŁo Paulo for the first time in September 2017.
Chichico Alkmim Fotografo surveys the life and work of Francisco Augusto âChichicoâ Alkmim (1886-1978), proprietor of the local photography studio in Diamantina, Minas Gerais. A diamond-mining centre in the18th- and 19th-centuries, Diamantina was a handsome colonial town (and is now a UNESCO World heritage Site), and its inhabitants seem to have enjoyed nothing better than gathering â in bars, cafes, the street, and most of all the studio â to have a picture taken by Chichico. Five thousand negatives from the photographerâs archives were donated to IMS in 2015, and they create a captivating insight into Brazilian life in the early 20th-century.
Chichico set up his studio in 1919, and much of this exhibition is dedicated to studio portraits. An excellent short documentary film shows the building where he worked: a deep, high-ceilinged room, with sunshine blazing in from both sides that the photographer managed with curtains and screens. He painted the backdrops himself.
The subjects are formally posed, with solemn expressions and intense eye contact. For the working classes in early 20th-century Brazil, one commentator explains, having your portrait taken was not simply a celebration of events or commemoration of milestones: it was evidence of going up in the world. Â
The exhibition displays a selection of these portraits printed life-size, so walking through the exhibition you encounter the citizens of Diamantina eye to eye. Itâs an extraordinarily strong and intimate experience.Â
Pride is an emotion that comes out clearly in these pictures. The women of Diamantina, according to one of the film commentators, prided themselves on being fashionable â and on their independence. One particularly delightful composition shows three young ladies lost in reverie whilst posing with two wine bottles (and glasses). Another shows a group of three women and three men, all raising glasses of beer in a solemn toast to the camera.
As well as studio portraits, Chichico photographed hundreds of street scenes. Crowds of children in school uniform; young guards in dress regalia; factory workers and municipal picnics; and lots and lots of musical groups. His ability to choreograph the crowd is a marvel: in scene after scene, dozens of faces stare directly at the photographer, not a blink or blurred expression in shot.Â
As well as documenting the attitudes and pastimes of Minas Gerais, Chichicoâs practice recorded the hardships of life in rural Brazil. One very poignant section of the exhibition shows photographs of dead children in their coffins, their grieving parents and siblings standing behind.Â
Another image, of the photographerâs own family, shows Chichico seated with a baby on his lap, his wife and little son standing by his side. Some versions are cropped to show only the family, but the whole frame reveals two more figures, a servant woman and child, propping up the backdrop. The woman is holding another toddler, out of shot, by the hand. The dirty, barefoot servant child contrasts strongly with the spit-and-polished Alkmim offspring. Chichico may have had a democratic approach to photography, but he was still a product of his times.Â
The last section of the exhibition presents close-up portraits made for official use, but here printed life-size. Again the effect is almost shockingly intimate. The photographer exposed two or more portraits together on glass plates, printing them like a contact sheet and cropping the individual pictures afterwards. The subjects have cards printed with numbers pegged to their jackets for later identification.Â
Again, the sitters look straight into the camera, some with expressions of anxiety, some with pride. The exhibition provides no information about these people, their names, their circumstances, even when the pictures were taken. But itâs impossible not to read more into these faces, to imagine their lives â and, even more, to imagine their feelings.   Â
As the first major exhibition in the new IMS, Chichico Alkmim Fotografo sets the bar very high. Lucky Paulistas can anticipate more great shows to come: meanwhile we photography lovers in the rest of the world can only hope that IMS is working on international partnerships and will be sharing some of Brazilâs photographic treasures very soon.
Chichico Alkmim Fotografo, IMS SĂŁo Paulo, until April 15, 2018.
Fab photography exhibition at the @fashiontextilemuseum #London this afternoon: "Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Style of Her Own" âą Starting as house photographer at Harper's Bazaar in 1936, LDW spent 22 years shooting fashion, portraits and covers - about 80 of them for Bazaar, which is an astonishing achievement âą Here's a perfect Sunday afternoon scene: Suzy Parker in Balenciaga, by the Seine, in 1953 (the artist is Betty Fenn, Dahl-Wolfe's assistant's sister) . . . . #photographyexhibition #fashiontextilemuseum #louisedahlwolfe #suzyparker #harpersbazaar (at Fashion and Textile Museum)
Another one from "Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Style of Her Own" at @fashiontextilemuseum this afternoon. This cover is one of scores LDW shot for Harper's Bazaar, here featuring young Betty Bacall as a beautiful blood donor supporting the US War effort in March 1946. (Working on the theory that there's a theatricality about LDW's compositions, but also she liked to show women composed, comfortable and in control. Contrary to some of her male counterparts. I feel a blog post coming on...) #harpersbazaar #louisedahlwolfe #laurenbacall #welovemagazines
There is still no medium that comes closer to art and actually cares about creativity [than glossy magazines]. Does Instagram invest in hiring the worldâs greatest photographers and pay the expenses for 12 assistants on a shoot? Does Twitter hire the worldâs top supermodels? It has been a privilege to work for an organisation that doesnât categorise journalism as "content" and hasnât substituted Mario Testino and Steven Meisel for user-generated photos of cats.
Magnum, the worldâs most famous photographersâ cooperative, celebrates its 70th anniversary this year.
Leonard Freed, Harlem Fashion Show, 1963
Among the various commemorative books, exhibitions (four in London alone), and t-shirt collections, the show currently at Le Bal presents a unique take on Magnumâs heritage.Â
The little prints in Analog Recovery were originally made for distribution to the press, starting with Magnumâs inception in 1947 and continuing till the late â70s. The exhibitionâs curator Diane Dufour tantalisingly describes âa collection of thousands of prints... stored in the Magnum archives in Paris in boxes bearing the name of each photographer.âÂ
The prints displayed are accompanied by commentary from the photographers themselves, including some original teletyped notes sent from worldwide war zones. These are by turns poignant, hilarious, hair-raising and heart-breaking. Gilles Peress, covering the Iranian revolution in 1979, tells head office, âNothingâs happening. Am tired. Out of money. Two cameras went dead in Beheshtezara Cemetery. Will probably return Monday.â Only to hear back, âImpossible you leave. Rumour hostage will be freed next Thursday. Also Life interested.â
Gilles Peress writes from the American embassy siege in Tehran, 1979-1980
The prospect of selling a story to a publication like Life was of course Magnumâs raison dâetre, certainly as far as some of the administrative staff were concerned. What would be the point of supporting the worldsâ greatest photojournalists if not to present their photojournalism to the world?Â
But of course the perennial problem of the photojournalist â do you put your camera down to help or do you keep shooting? â is often the dynamic that drives this exhibition. Werner Bischof says, âWhen you think like an editor yourself youâve already gone wrong, because then you have put the event first.âÂ
Werner Bischof, Magnum Analog Recovery
Bischof is only one of the photographers who profess dismay, disgust or despair with where their talents have led them. âI am simply not a newspaper reporter,â he says, âI am prostituting my work and I have had enough.â
Erich Lessing, documenting street fighting in Hungary in 1956, writes, âI had thought... that by taking pictures we were showing what the world is like, that you can at least in a small way influence behaviours and the course of politics. But every journalist knows... the most horrible war pictures will not end wars.â
Erich Lessing, Budapest, 1956
But for every Werner Bischof there was an Elliott Erwitt. His trip to the USSR in 1957 was an assignment for Holiday magazine, to document the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution. Erwitt shot âthe first pictures of the Soviet missiles that were seen in the West which testified to the technological superiority of the Soviets over the Americans.âÂ
He also witnessed âThe Kitchen Debate,â a moment when Soviet Premier Kruschev and the visiting US President Nixon argued publicly. Erwitt wrote, âThis picture was used in Nixonâs campaign to show what a tough guy he was... I am pleased with the pictures but I am not terribly proud of the use that was made of it but what are you going to do? You just take the pictures.â
Elliott Erwitt, Nikita Kruschev and Richard Nixon in Moscow, 1957
Itâs impossible not to sympathise with the Magnum members who suffered for their work (George Rodger in Bergen-Belsen in 1945:Â âThe dead were lying around, 4000 of them, and I found I was getting bodies into photographic compositions. I said, My God, what has happened to me?...[But] it had to be photographed because people had to know.â)Â
George Rodger at Bergen-Belsen, 1945
But at the same time, one can only be grateful that they bore witness. In a world where every smartphone is a camera, and respect for the photographic profession is declining rapidly, this exhibition is a clear illustration of the âwhyâ of photography. Photographers may not stop terrible things happening, but they can stop us from lying to ourselves that everythingâs ok.
A major adjunct to Magnum Analog Recovery is the catalogue that commemorates the exhibition. Itâs presented as an A4 horizontal ring binder: 230 pages, including reprints of the images and text from the photographers, foldouts, enlargements, and plenty of anecdotes. It is simply, brilliantly, and beautifully designed and edited. Itâs available in French or English, and can be ordered online for just âŹ60. Definitely a candidate for photobook of the year.
Tickets for London's most popular art exhibition this spring, the blockbuster David Hockney retrospective at Tate Britain, cost ÂŁ19.50 each. Now you can catch the same show at the Pompidou in Paris, as well as the museum's comprehensive and thoughtful Walker Evans retrospective, for âŹ14.00. (What's more galling: the vast gap between what you have to pay to see art in London vs Paris, or the vast gap in what art you can actually see?)
The last time the UK hosted a Walker Evans' photography exhibition was 14 years ago, when Evans' Polaroids were shown at The Photographers' Gallery and his work was part of Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph at Tate Modern. The current show at the Pompidou includes over 400 prints, artefacts and documents, including, as the organisers justifiably claim, the best examples of his work. Alongside these are some of Evans' more telling personal possessions â postcards, advertising placards, signs and posters, which he photographed and collected as he travelled around the country.
Born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1903, Evans was the son of an advertising executive (which perhaps helps explain his fondness for ad posters). Aged 23 he spent a year in Paris, translating Baudelaire and Blaise Cendrars and tentatively taking photographs. Some of his early images in this show, like New York City Street Corner, 1929, are somewhat reminiscent of Paul Strand with their dramatic angles and lighting.Â
However, there's no evidence that Evans knew the older photographer, and in 1929 he was introduced to the work of someone who would prove much more influential: EugĂšne Atget.Â
Atgetâs champion in America was Berenice Abbot. Like Evans, she had gone from New York to Paris in the 1920s and clearly thrived there, studying sculpture and assisting Man Ray before opening her own studio where she photographed the likes of James Joyce and Jean Cocteau. Man Ray introduced her to EugĂšne Atget, then in his late 60s, and the two became friends. On his death, Abbott acquired the photographerâs archive and brought it to NY. Evans first encountered Atgetâs work in Bereniceâs apartment, and the experience was clearly a formative one.
Atget's pictures of turn of the century Paris avoided arty effects, concentrating on simple subjects simply composed: people at ground level, ordinary buildings and streets, unprepossessing store fronts and shop windows.
EugĂšne Atget, Cours DâAmoy 12, Place de la Bastille, c.1895
In terms of both subject matter and approach, Atgetâs work clearly struck a chord with the young Walker Evans. Some of his subsequent work seems like homage to specific Atget images â like the abandoned Model T Fords in Joeâs Auto Graveyard which echo the piles of carriage wheels in Cours DâAmoy 12, Place de la Bastille.Â
Much later in his life, in an interview in 1971, Evans said: âYou donât want your work to spring from art; you want it to commence from life, and thatâs in the street now. Iâm interested in whatâs called vernacular. For example, finished, I mean educated, architecture doesnât interest me, but I love to find American vernacularâ.
In 1938 Evans started photographing commuters on the New York subway, using a miniature camera hidden inside his coat to catch people off guard and unawares. MOMA describes how he âconcealed his 35-millimeter Contax camera by painting its shiny chrome parts black and hiding it under his topcoat, with only its lens peeking out between two buttons. He rigged its shutter to a cable release, whose cord snaked down his sleeve and into the palm of his hand, which he kept buried in his pocket. For extra assurance, he asked his friend and fellow photographer Helen Levitt to join him on his subway shoots, believing that his activities would be less noticeable if he was accompanied by someone.â A collection of these images, edited from over 600 originals, was eventually published in 1966 in a book entitled Many Are Called, with text by Evansâ writer friend James Agee.
The Subway Photographs in this exhibition are small and intense. Their tight framing and artificial light gives them a dramatic feel, but they are entirely natural. Evans described these pictures as "what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.â
Some of his most famous portraits, also in the show, share these qualities â apart from the anonymity. Evansâ portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs has become one of the most recognisable images in American photography. A mother of four and, at just 27, old beyond her years, Burroughs was the wife of a sharecropper whose family was documented by Evans and James Agee in another book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Four frames of Allie Mae exist, with her expression varying from anxiety to a hint of a smile. The exhibition shows two versions, with recordings of Allie Mae talking about her experiences.Â
Walker was chary of commercial commissions, but in 1935 was contracted to work with the âhistorical unitâ of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), part of the Department of Agriculture, on a project to document rural America, primarily the South, in pictures. He spent 18 months travelling, often alone, recording the people and their way of life. In 1936 he started working with Agee, a journalist writing for Fortune magazine, and accompanied him to Hale County, Alabama, where they met the Burroughs family and their neighbours.
The pictures, and Ageeâs words, never made it into Fortune, but with the publication of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941, the sharecropping families of Hale County were immortalised, their poverty presented with unflinching but undramatic clarity.Â
In 1943 Evans was hired by Time Inc., and worked for the company, mainly Fortune, for the next 22 years. One set of images in this exhibition, Anonymous Labour, shows men and women walking in the street in Detroit on a Saturday afternoon in 1946. Photographed from below waist height, they hurry past, a few casting suspicious glances towards the photographer, most ignoring him. Fortuneâs text reads, âThe American worker, as he passes here, generally unaware of Walker Evansâ camera, is a decidedly various fellow... When editorialists lump them as âlabor,â these laborers can no doubt laugh that one off.âÂ
Walker Evans, Anonymous Labor, 1946
The legendary John Szarkowski, Director of the Photography Department at New Yorkâs Museum of Modern Art, described Evans' work as "puritanically economical, precisely measured... qualities that seemed more appropriate to a bookkeeper's ledger than to art.Â
âBut... [his art] constitutes a personal survey of the interior resources of the American tradition, a survey based on a sensibility that found poetry and complexity where most earlier travelers had found only drab statistics or fairy tales."
This exhibition is comprehensive in a way Evans himself might appreciate. It presents a vast amount of material, neatly and accessibly, and rewards the patient visitor with wonderful discoveries.
Walker Evans: A Vernacular Style, Centre Pompidou, Paris, until August 14th, 2017
