225

On
Feminism
 In capitalist society, artists are represented as possessing a
privileged subjectivity, gifted with an uncommon unity of self and
labor. Artists are the bearers of an autonomy that is systematically
and covertly denied the economically objectified mass spectator,
the wageworker and the woman who works without wages in the
home. Even the apparatus of mass culture itself can be bent to this
elitist logic. “Artists” are the people who stare out, accusingly and
seductively, from billboards and magazine advertisements. A glam-
orous young couple can be seen lounging in what looks like a SoHo
loft; they tell us of the secret of white rum, effortlessly gleaned
from Liza Minelli at an Andy Warhol party. Richard Avedon is of-
fered to us as an almost impossible ideal: bohemian as well as his
“own Guggenheim Foundation.” Artist and patron coalesce in a
petit-bourgeois dream fleshed-out in the realm of a self-valorizing
mass culture. Further, the recent efforts to elevate photography
unequivocally to the status of high art by transforming the photo-
graphic print into a privileged commodity, and the photographer,
regardless of working context, into an autonomous auteur with a
capacity for genius, have the effect of restoring the “aura,” to use
Walter Benjamin’s term, to a mass-communications technology. At
the same time, the camera hobbyist, the consumer of leisure tech-
nology, is invited to participate in a delimited and therefore illusory
and pathetic creativity, in an advertising induced fantasy of self-
authorship fed by power over the image machine, and through it,
over its prey.
Allan Sekula

Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary

MACK
(Notes on the Politics of Representation) (1976 / 1978)
© Allan Sekula Studio
Included in Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays 1973-1983
www.mackbooks.co.uk published by MACK
Anthony Hernandez, Discarded #50, 2014; courtesy the artist; © Anthony Hernandez

ANTHONY HERNANDEZ
Now through January 2, 2017

The new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is proud to present the first major retrospective of the work of
Los Angeles–based photographer Anthony Hernandez. The exhibition and fully-illustrated accompanying
catalogue include many photographs that have never been shown before, drawn from across Hernandez’s
dynamic and varied 45-year career. Anthony Hernandez is on view in the new Pritzker Center for Photography,
which is made possible by the Lisa and John Pritzker Family Fund.

Reserve your tickets now at www.sfmoma.org.

acehotel.com/pittsburgh
 Capture the Glory of Blue Hour
with X Series Digital Cameras

Photo © 2016 Elia Locardi | FUJIFILM X-T2 Camera and XF10-24mmF4 R OIS Lens at 18 sec at F8, ISO200
Winter 2016 Words Pictures
22 On Feminism 48 Cosey Fanni Tutti
Contributions by Catherine Morris, Introduction by Alison M. Gingeras
Zanele Muholi, Laurie Simmons,
Johanna Fateman, Zackary Drucker, 60 Gillian Wearing
and A. L. Steiner Introduction by Jennifer Blessing

30 Modern Women: 72 Yurie Nagashima

David Campany in Conversation Introduction by Lesley A. Martin
with Marta Gili, Julie Jones,
and Roxana Marcoci 78 Hannah Starkey
The artists who redefined the course Introduction by Sara Knelman
of twentieth-century photography
94 Katharina Gaenssler
40 The Feminist Avant-Garde Introduction by Yvonne Bialek
In self-portraiture and body art,
experimental pioneers of the 1970s 114 Josephine Pryde
by Nancy Princenthal Introduction by Alex Klein

54 Sex Wars Revisited 120 Laia Abril

Lesbian erotica as critical rebellion Introduction by Karen Archey
by Laura Guy
126 Farah Al Qasimi
64 A Taste of Power: Introduction by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Renée Cox in Conversation
with Uri McMillan 132 Martine Syms
From Angela Davis to Beyoncé, Introduction by Amanda Hunt
the icons and avatars of black style
144 Elle Pérez
88 History Is Ours Introduction by Salamishah Tillet
The legacy of protest in video
and performance
by Eva Díaz

100 On Defiance
How women have resisted
representational photography
by Eva Respini

108 Beyond Binary

New visions of trans feminism
by Julia Bryan-Wilson
Front
138 Our Bodies, Online
9 Redux Feminist images in the age
Brian Wallis on Leonard Freed’s of Instagram
Black in White America, 1968 by Carmen Winant
13 Spotlight
Eli Durst’s In Asmara
by Alexandra Pechman
16 Curriculum Opposite:
Josephine Pryde, Gift
by Martha Rosler For Me, Simon Lee Gallery
Christmas 2013 (2), 2015
19 Dispatches Courtesy the artist and
Maria Nicolacopoulou on Athens Simon Lee Gallery, London/
Hong Kong

Front cover:
Gillian Wearing,
Back Me as Cahun Holding
a Mask of My Face, 2012
© the artist and courtesy
152 Object Lessons Tanya Bonakdar Gallery,
New York; Maureen Paley,
Les Femmes de l’Avenir, London; and Regen Projects,
1900–1902 Los Angeles

AP E RTU RE W I N T E R 2 0 1 6
 The Magazine of Photography and Ideas

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Michael Famighetti
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Nicole Moulaison
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1 diane arbus: in the beginning; By Jeff L. Rosenheim; Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Distributed by Yale University Press 2 Street:
The Human Clay; By Lee Friedlander; Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery 3 Western Landscapes; By Lee Friedlander, with an essay by Richard
Benson and an afterword by Jock Reynolds; Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery 4 Detroit After Dark: Photographs from the Collection of the
Detroit Institute of Arts; By Nancy W. Barr, with essays by Sara Blair and Chris Tysh; Distributed for the Detroit Institute of Arts 5 Kentucky Renaissance:
The Lexington Camera Club and Its Community, 1954Â1974; By Brian Sholis, with an essay by John Jeremiah Sullivan; Published in association with the
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Lyon: Message to the Future; By Julian Cox, with Elisabeth Sussman, Alexander Nemerov, Danica Willard Sachs, Ed Halter, and Alan Rinzler; Published in
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Yale university press art + architecture

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 their anger, and their strategies for getting
Redux by in a social situation so overwhelmingly
Rediscovered Books stacked against them. With typical
precision, Freed notes, “The sensitive
and Writings Negro has four choices: to kill himself
(a solution many have chosen), to become
psychotic (and the full institutions testify
to this), to conform, or lastly, to become
superhuman and overcome his human
sickness.”
Ever conscious of his own white
privilege, Freed is a curious but discreet
intruder, peering around corners.
“What’d you be doing here with that
camera? Mister. Don’t be fooling around
here. We ain’t in no good mood.” He
silently snaps his pictures and lets his
subjects present themselves and tell their
own stories, detailing the psychic effects
of two hundred years of racial oppression.
His goal was, he said, to try to be “both
inside and outside,” a witness artist.
The rich and shadowy photographs he
captured expose everyday moments: the
beatific expression of a female protester
in the arms of police, clutching her Bible;
the beaming father of a biracial baby; a
cluster of sharecroppers’ children reflected
in a mirror, curious and smiling; a large
Santa Claus with his arms outspread; a
small street kid making a muscle, acting
tough; a line of voters patiently waiting
to exercise their hard-won rights.
As a photojournalist, Freed specialized
in such small moments; he eschewed
celebrities and news events. He said of
his image of Martin Luther King, Jr. amid
a crowd of admirers, days after winning
the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, “I was more
A searing chronicle of society and race in the 1960s interested in the people, in their hands,
Brian Wallis than I was in Martin Luther King.”
Freed was a humanist, one of the original
concerned photographers, but his searing
reports and fervent photographs never
From its stark white title on a black The resulting book, with writing settle for uplifting stories of “dignity”
cover to its final text predicting riots and layout by Freed, is a dark study, in the face of adversity. Instead, he meant
in Washington, D.C., Leonard Freed’s a surprising montage of photographs, for his pictures to show ordinary people
photobook Black in White America sometimes clustered six or eight to just living, experiencing joy in everyday
(1968) is a blistering and prescient vision a spread, interspersed with randomly life, even with the heavy weight of racial
of race in America. Compiled at the placed bursts of prose that serve more injustice pressing down upon them. As
height of racial tension and civil rights as commentary than captions. Alongside fragments of this larger photo-essay, his
demonstrations, bracketed by the 1963 Freed’s lush black-and-white photographs, individual pictures accumulate political
March on Washington and Martin Luther there are brightly described encounters, meaning: they testify.
King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Freed’s faithfully transcribed snatches of
volume is a penetrating journey through a conversations, bits of sermons, and
vast terra incognita for white folks, depicting, verses of spirituals heard in rural churches.
in words and images, the other side of A sensitive observer, Freed makes
the tracks from Harlem to New Orleans no attempt to speak for the African
to the Sea Islands of South Carolina. As a Americans he meets, though he notes
young white New Yorker who had mostly and understands their silent contempt
been living in Europe for the previous for what he calls “white America.” He
decade, Freed traveled the byways of transcribes their daily trials with great
race in America like a foreigner, with an fidelity, in precise and poetic texts, and Cover of Black in White
America (New York:
air of skepticism or disbelief and a skilled he enters the locales where they feel most Grossman, 1968) Brian Wallis is a curator
photojournalist’s eye for telling details. comfortable confessing to him their fears, Courtesy Magnum Photos based in New York.

RE D U X 9
 international limited-residency
MFA PHOTOGRAPHY
www.hartfordphotomfa.org

Photo © 2016 Tamara Reynolds

Faculty and Lecturers Include:

Robert Lyons - Director We believe that the art world is situated within a global
Michael Vahrenwald, Dr. Jörg Colberg, Alice Rose George, market and our program is uniquely designed to access
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Ute Mahler, Doug Dubois, Dru Donovan, John Priola, created for the engaged professional investigating art,
Alec Soth, Thomas Weski, Misha Kominek, Lisa Kereszi, documentary practice, and the photo-based book.
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(USA), Lucy Helton (UK), Morgan Ashcom (USA),
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Spotlight
Eli Durst

In Eritrea, a young photographer pursues a cinematic vision

Alexandra Pechman

Eli Durst spent his summers during high In the 1930s, following four decades of city for the first time, arranging for the
school and college assembling asylum colonization, Italian fascist forces imposed brother of an Eritrean translator who
applications at the Austin immigration the charge of futurism on Asmara through works with his mother’s clinic to serve
clinic where his mother works as a legal hundreds of new buildings, often shaped as a guide. He showed Durst the city
advocate, often for refugees from Eritrea. like the era’s latest technology: airplanes, for a few days, but then was forced to
Durst took passport photographs and met radios, trains. The invasion of British report for military training—another
dozens of people who had crossed the U.S. troops in 1941, during World War II, reason Eritreans leave the country.
border from Mexico after landing there brought an end to the Italian colony and Durst toured Asmara using a 2003
by circuitous journeys and illegal means, the architectural explosion. Today, buildings architectural survey, but found he was not
fleeing Eritrea’s authoritarian government remain remarkably undisturbed after years allowed to photograph iconic buildings.
and standstill economy. Yet, some of war and undemocratic regimes. Though still standing, the majority have
Eritreans spoke wistfully about the “That really interested me, this fallen into disrepair. A 1930s swimming
underrecognized allure of Asmara, kind of a duality of people’s love for this hall he wanted to photograph had, he
the nation’s capital and a time capsule place while they are doing everything learned, been closed for a decade, and
of early twentieth-century colonial they can to leave,” Durst told me recently. buildings converted for government use
Italian architecture. In the summer of 2015, Durst visited the were restricted. With limited accessibility,

S P OTL I GH T 1 3
Previous page:
Photographer, 2015

This page:
Samson and Winta,
2015

Durst focused on silent details, and a puddle of standing water. Untouched After graduating in 2011, he moved to
took cues from the cinematic styles coffee cups crowd a brimming ashtray New York to learn more about photography,
of Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, on a table. A place setting of food awaits working at Griffin Editions and as an
and, most of all, Michelangelo Antonioni. a diner. assistant for Joel Meyerowitz, whom
“I couldn’t not see it that way,” Durst said. “All you can talk about is how he cites as an influence. Durst later
“Asmara looks so much like the world I’ve beautiful it is, because everyone is afraid attended the Yale University School of
seen in these midcentury Italian films. of being critical,” Durst said. Eritrea has Art for his MFA, where he began to work
Antonioni, particularly, conveys a certain no free press and one of the world’s worst on his Asmara portfolio.
beauty with an underlying tension, where records for free speech. Journalists who The retouched passport photographs
you have this setting but it’s disintegrating.” speak out against the government are that Durst took over the years in Austin
Durst’s sharply contrasted black-and- imprisoned, email and Internet use are (and now uses in his work, with applicants’
white images from Asmara are often closely monitored, and foreign journalists consent) punctuate the series and connect
devoid of people, though the sense remains are not allowed to enter the country. Durst’s engagement with Eritreans in
that someone has just left or is soon to (Durst traveled under a tourist visa.) Austin and Asmara. Other images have
appear in the frame. The Roman lettering Durst, a native Texan, took faces and bodies that are clipped, cropped,
of AMOR on a building reflects up from photography classes at Wesleyan University. or seen at a distance.

AP E RTURE 14
 Steak, 2015

All photographs from

the series In Asmara
Courtesy the artist

In a photograph taken in the dining speak English and Durst was without
room of his nearly unoccupied hotel a translator, so during their hour-long
(tourism to Eritrea is made difficult by tour Durst never learned his name.
a government wary of Western agitators In Durst’s image of their encounter,
and influence), a waiter in suit and tie the unknown photographer, his face
stands in front of a contemporarily dressed obscured by the Olympus, trains his
man seated alone among empty tables. analog lens on Durst, a seeming nod
Durst’s trip coincided with Ramadan, to the obscured face of Thomas in the
and on Eid al-Fitr local photographers popular imagery from Blow-Up (1966),
Eli Durst is the winner of
take pictures of celebrating families. Antonioni’s seminal meditation on the 2016 Portfolio Prize.
One took notice of Durst. “All the the medium of photography. His exhibition In Asmara
younger photographers had digital and “With Antonioni, there are these opens at the Aperture
Gallery in December.
he had this old Olympus,” Durst said. complicated and often very scary political For more information
“He saw me and I stood out. He took undercurrents,” Durst said. “That about the Portfolio Prize,
Alexandra Pechman is now open exclusively
my picture and then pulled me aside and photographic tension exists in his films. a writer based in Rio de to Aperture subscribers,
led me around the city.” The man didn’t That’s what was driving me.” Janeiro and New York. visit aperture.org.

S P OTL I GH T 1 5
Curriculum
A List of Favorite Anythings
by Martha Rosler
Through photography, video, performance, and cultural criticism,
Martha Rosler has rigorously probed a host of sociopolitical questions with
signature intelligence and wit. From her classic video Semiotics of the Kitchen
(1975), which humorously critiqued women’s role in society, to her canny
photomontages that juxtapose scenes of American domestic comforts
with images of foreign wars, she has used her artwork to shine a hard light
on urgent realities.

Roland Barthes, “The Great Ousmane Sembène, Stuart Hall, “The Social Eye
Family of Man,” 1957 Black Girl, 1966 of Picture Post,” 1972
In his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes compellingly Black Girl viscerally illuminates colonialism as This fine-grained analysis of a foundational picture
dissects The Family of Man, the encyclopedic nothing had previously been able to do for me. This magazine of mid-twentieth-century Britain widens
photography exhibition that achieved great neorealist film reverses the terms of the European into a dissection of the relationship between image,
resonance when it was featured at the Museum of bildungsroman, starting with the gender of its text, and society. It offers an exhilarating synthesis
Modern Art in 1955. Barthes’s unsparing analysis subject, Diouana. Traveling with her employers from of left theorizing about the way society and history
revealed, despite the show’s perhaps laudable recently independent but not quite postcolonial help produce what may appear to ordinary viewers
aspirations, the sentimentality of its anthropological Senegal to a relatively modest apartment in a French as transparent, “straight photography.” Hall uses
premise—in which all people, no matter how coastal resort town, she experiences a demotion the phrases “social eye” and “a way of seeing”
different, are fundamentally “just like us,” to judge from governess to maid, rather than a rise in status to warn readers away from reductive readings.
by the basic social institutions that formed the and fortune. Imprisoned in a tiny room, verbally He credits Picture Post—which in many ways shaped
exhibition’s taxonomic categories. Barthes’s abused by Madame, she is reduced to silent and reflected British responses to World War II—
emphasis on what he described as its underlying isolation—effectively unable to narrate her own with presenting the look and feel of people’s
myth, of the “magical unity” of the human tale. Black Girl impelled me to write Tijuana Maid (not the High Command’s) war experiences, both
“community,” underlines the issues we struggle (1976), a postcard novel about women as invisible personal and collective. Hall’s article buttressed
with today. domestics. The postcards have no images, only a my dedication to the “collective formation of a
story drafted from interviews with Mexican women distinctive social eye” in the interest of collective
Albert and David Maysles, working as maids, which was translated into Spanish social change.
with Mexican friends.
Salesman, 1968
In this black-and-white realist documentary,
Ken Light, What’s Going On?
peripatetic Bible salesmen wander in the wilderness
Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville, 1969–1974, 2015
of desire in late 1960s America, seeking painfully 1965 This photobook attests to the development of one
elusive economic success by bilking financially Despite initially seeing Alphaville as a minor effort in person’s photographic practice and consciousness,
struggling families who share the salesmen’s Godard’s pop-genre excavations, I soon understood set within the movements of the day. In Ken Light’s
professed allegiance to church and aspirations it as a cartoon on the order of his Brechtian Les photographs, pretty well everyone is either going
for their children. On the phone with their wives, carabiniers (1963). Alphaville combines genres: somewhere or doing something—alone, in groups,
in conversations in crappy motels, and in conferences low-grade film noir, road movie, cold war political or in outright conflict and resistance. His pictures
of Bible salesmen, their existential and moral thriller, dystopian sci-fi. A continuation of Godard’s show subcultural worlds of meaning and belonging,
dilemmas emerge. The salesmen and their meditations on film, on the one hand, and human from tribalism both generational and political to
prospective marks feel the undertow of marginality language and meaning (okay, on love) on the other, increasingly commanding televisual images and
in a country seemingly depressed by the Vietnam with scenes of radical alienation and displacement, militaristic billboards. Light shows us the collective
War, unsettled by urban insurrection, seeking relief trailing clouds of existential doubt. In my video work movement forward, in love and in struggle, on both
in a bubble of religious certainty—in fact, I would there is much of Godard. My performance-based sides of the political divide, and exemplifies the
class Salesman as a war film. My own work addresses video Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained power of photography to both reveal and form those
how to represent the disconnect between home (1977), although directly referencing only Godard’s movements. It’s the right moment for this book
and abroad while conveying the shadow of our film Vivre sa vie (1962), most directly bears the to appear, to make connections between another
entanglements. Salesman’s power is in the delineation stamp of his wider influence. phoenix-like rebirth among young people of a
of this difficult knot. collective effort for social justice.
Susan Meiselas,
Patricio Guzmán, La batalla de Carnival Strippers, 1976
Chile (The Battle of Chile), 1975 Carnival Strippers came to my attention just when we Opposite, clockwise
La batalla de Chile, shot during the administration feminists were coming to terms with “objectifying” from top left:
of socialist president Salvador Allende in a period images of women and the effects of what we soon cover of Roland Barthes,
of escalating social and political strife, culminates in called “the male gaze.” I was trying to work out the Mythologies, 1957;
the fascist military coup of September 11, 1973. Soon question of photography’s potent ability to define Mbissine Thérèse Diop
after, the film crews fled for their lives. Edited from how others are perceived, particularly those whom as Diouana in Black Girl,
smuggled-out footage, the three-part film assembles people look down on because of identity or labor. 1966; still from La batalla
diverse news and documentary sources into a Carnival Strippers daringly plunged into a world de Chile, 1975; John
Sotomayor, Albert Maysles
coherent political analysis. An urgent voiceover of marginalized women engaged in body-centered
holds a camera built
explicates events: street unrest, labor strikes, and activities often treated as degrading—not much
by his brother David,
other struggles that led to the coup. At the end above prostitution. Meiselas adopted a kind of left, in New York, 1968;
of part one, a cameraman is killed by a soldier’s quasi-anthropological approach, forming friendships, Susan Meiselas, Tunbridge
bullet; the camera’s image flying upward becomes however intermittent, with the women she met. Vermont, 1974, from the
the apotheosis of the film’s struggle to be made and The photobook marries a classic documentary style series Carnival Strippers;
of the people’s narrative. The camera, as useless in with embedded narrative. Meiselas’s work produces Ken Light, End of the
overcoming fascism as the unarmed populace, turns empathy while refusing either egoistic bravado or Nixon Era, West Oakland,
out to be a weapon in a yet wider political struggle. a saccharine play for sympathy. CA, 1974

AP E RTU RE 1 6
 Clockwise from top right: Black Girl: Courtesy Janus films; La batalla de Chile: © Patricio Guzmán and courtesy Icarus Films; Maysles: © The New York Times/Redux; Susan Meiselas: © the artist/Magnum Photos; Ken Light: © the artist and courtesy Contact Press Images

CURRICULUM 1 7
Mexico
P H O T O G RA P H S BY M A R K C O H E N

Capturing the country’s visual surrealism in

striking detail, Mexico presents two hundred
Mark Cohe
images by Mark Cohen, the acclaimed street pho- n
tographer and author of Frame and Dark Knees.
Copublished with Xavier Barral, Paris
200 duotone photos • $55.00 hardcover
Mexico

Antebellum
BY G I L L E S M O RA

These impressionistic, rarely seen images by prom-

inent French photographer and critic Gilles Mora
evoke the disappearing culture of the Deep South.
Copublished with Editions Lamaindonne, France
127 duotone photos • $50.00 hardcover

The Bread Book

BY KENNETH JOSEPHSON

This signed limited edition of 250 copies

brings back into print a critically acclaimed
conceptual work that stands as a landmark
in the history of the photography book.
Copublished with Only Photography, Berlin
20 duotone photos • $40.00 paperback

The Recurring Dream

BY ROCK Y SCHENCK
FOREWORD BY WILLIAM FRIEDKIN

This collection of new work by Rocky

Schenck presents hand-tinted color
images that lead viewers through
hypnotic landscapes and subversive
tableaux rich in psychological subtext
and unpredictable narratives.
141 color photos • $50.00 hardcover

university of texas press

utexaspress.com
Dispatches
Athens

A collective of artists reimagines contemporary Greece

Maria Nicolacopoulou

Art flourishes in times of adversity. In free time. By resurrecting and embracing were experiencing it themselves, versus
the charged political landscape of Athens, the value of communal ideals, strangers the Athens being portrayed by foreign
austerity measures and the prevailing from different backgrounds and and domestic media. Their gatherings
division in the European Union have disciplines come together to experiment soon led to exhibition opportunities. As
taken an irreversible toll on the city often collectively—a configuration quite they characteristically state, their mission
referred to as the cradle of democracy. unknown to the mantra of neoliberalism is to “document our own downfall rather
Yet, there is a pulse of creative inspiration and individualism heard throughout than someone else doing it for us, in this
and artistic production. On ghostlike the art world. colonialist-style ‘crisis supermarket’ the
streets where businesses are closing The idea was born at the onset of the country has turned into.”
down and rental signs are ubiquitous, Greek crisis by the photographer Pavlos From Eirini Vourloumis’s photographs
new artist-run spaces have emerged and Fysakis, who was drawn to the artwork of ministry interiors and Georges
collectives are being formed. being produced in Greece at the time Salameh’s peripatetic discovery of
Depression Era is one of the products and looking for a way to tie it all into an overlooked urban scenes to Kostas
of this condition. Formed in 2011 and action. Fysakis started inviting people Kapsianis’s upscale suburbia and Marinos
with almost thirty members to date, to come together, and the invited ones, Tsagkarakis’s abandoned beach bars,
the collective operates in a unique format: once they joined, could then invite others. the result is a diverse mapping of the
its members are professional artists, The group began having conversations city. Despite its range of individual
photojournalists, architects, activists, and about their work and the need to depict sensibilities, the collective’s vision
filmmakers who are joining forces in their the hidden reality of their city as they manages to meet at the intersection of

D I S PATCH E S 1 9
Previous page: ability to speak out provides a platform
Georges Salameh,
Broken Nose, 2012, upon which disillusionment, insecurity,
from the series Spleen and despair transgress into a sense of
Courtesy the artist
clarity and transparency for the present
moment.
Members of Depression Era, including
Fysakis, George Moutafis, Tsagkarakis,
Maria Mavropoulou, Kapsianis, and
Pasqua Vorgia, could also be found at
this year’s Athens Photo Festival (APF).
APF, an institutional synecdoche
of the photographic world, is the first
private festival in the country and
the fifth oldest photography festival in
the world. Initially conceived in 1987
as a biennial with support from the state,
APF is now annual and scarcely self-funded;
its committed team, led by Manolis
Moresopoulos, is mostly compensated
by the pride of accomplishing something
otherwise impossible. With other similar
photography initiatives having tried and
failed to sustain themselves in Greece
throughout the years, APF’s ability to
successfully establish its presence within
the international scene is also a reflection
of photography’s historic trajectory in
the country, as the medium slowly began
to be considered fine art in the 1990s.
Just as APF’s development testifies
to photography’s development in Greece,
so does Depression Era’s nomadic and
diasporic circumstance act as a reflection
of the political climate. With a growing
institutional presence and educational
action in the form of seminars and
workshops, Depression Era uses art to
Eirini Vourloumis, a nostalgic longing for the past and the chronicle an honest and untold story of
Ceremony Hall, Panteion
University of Social symbolic interpretation of the living the city’s urban landscape. Rendering an
and Political Sciences, present, producing an ironic commentary alternative visual archive of contemporary
November 2013
Courtesy the artist and an inescapable projection of a future Athens, Depression Era attests to this
promise. nation’s uncompromised free spirit.
“The making of culture produces
politics,” Fysakis explains. It was vital,
then, for Depression Era to channel their
production of knowledge appropriately,
which led to the group’s action being
directed toward “infiltrating the system
Depression Era and the institutions” rather than adopting
conventional activist action formats,
uses art to chronicle like public protests or local interventions.
an honest and untold At the 5th Thessaloniki Biennale in 2015,
for example, Depression Era exhibited a
story of the city’s project compiled of their own work mixed
urban landscape. with images by participants who had
taken part in their workshop series earlier
in the year, some of whom had never
been exhibited before. The strength and
power of the group lies not only in their
individual artistic practices, but in the
collective effort made for those practices
to be exhibited within a dismantled and Maria Nicolacopoulou
censored sociopolitical context, where is a curator, writer,
and researcher based
opportunities to be heard are nonexistent. between Athens, London,
The empowerment generated via their and the U.S.

AP E RTURE 20
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AP E RTURE 22
 Farah Al Qasimi,
S Folding Blanket, 2016
Courtesy the artist and
The Third Line, Dubai

On
Feminism

More than one hundred years before Laura Mulvey coined the The aspirations and demands of feminist movements have
phrase “the male gaze” in the 1970s, pioneers of photography changed dramatically. A century ago, women protested for the
such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Virginia Oldoini, Countess vote. Today, women lead from the heights of politics and business.
of Castiglione, were fully aware of what it meant to author one’s Celebrities have taken up the mantle of popular feminism,
own image. The abolitionist Sojourner Truth deployed her while movements for women’s advocacy have earned wide
portrait for the cause of freedom. “I Sell the Shadow to Support exposure internationally. But the struggle endures. Beyoncé
the Substance,” her cartes-de-visite read. A medium that could lands a commercial hit with her provocative visual album Lemonade,
fabricate denigrating notions of gender and identity would but in Pakistan, the social-media star Qandeel Baloch is killed
also be wielded in the service of self-expression and personal for her self-expression on Instagram. Trans actress Laverne Cox
transformation. As Julia Bryan-Wilson writes in these pages, graces the cover of Time magazine, but trans individuals still
“Female photographers have long been riveted by the structures face the daily threat of violence from Detroit to Johannesburg.
of gender—its theatrics, its stereotypes—in order to explode For the photographer and activist Zanele Muholi, who has
them.” spent her career documenting LGBT women for posterity,
This issue focuses on intergenerational dialogues, the photograph is the record of a life lived, the proof of existence.
debates, and strategies of feminism in photography and While not all of the artists in this issue address feminist
considers the immense contributions by artists whose work politics explicitly—and what exactly defines such politics varies
articulates or interrogates representations of women in media widely—they are each, in their own ways, concerned with how
and society. Guided by conversations with the contributors, women are envisioned by art, culture, and memory. Their work
as well as a range of critics and scholars of feminist art, underscores how photography has shaped feminism as much as
this issue arrives at a moment when the very idea of gender how feminism has shaped photography. To set the scene for the
is central to conversations about equality, and the power words and pictures to follow, Aperture asked six leading artists
and influence that women hold on the world stage is and thinkers to describe what matters today in photography and
irrefutable. feminism. Here’s what they have to say. —The Editors

E D I TO RS ’ N OTE 23
 was an experiment in visual perception. Asking
her boyfriend to take photographs as she moved
incrementally closer to the camera, Wilson wanted
to see if there was a distinct moment when the
camera exposed her gender-bending charade.
(The single photograph presented here is extracted
from her series Posturing.) After these images
were shot, Wilson expanded her project, venturing
into a Halifax, Nova Scotia, men’s room to see if
unsuspecting men would discern her subterfuge as
readily as her boyfriend’s viewfinder had. One of this
photograph’s deceptions, then, is the implication
that the picture was taken for purposes of illustrating
the narrative attached to it, when, in fact, it was
taken before Wilson even had the idea for her
performative confrontation. It doesn’t offer any
actual information about the moment it purports
to document.
Wilson credits the conceptual performance
artist Vito Acconci, a visiting professor at Nova
Scotia College of Art & Design when she was
studying there in 1973, with giving her the agency
to consider the tropes of gender as legitimate
subjects for art making. Out of her personal interior
dialogues of critique and insecurity, she wanted
her work to honestly and humorously describe
the weight of internalized social scrutiny under
which women somehow managed to function.
That same year Wilson met the critic Lucy R.
Lippard, who was also at the school as a visiting
critic. In a resonant gesture of support, Lippard
assured Wilson the work she was doing was art,
and through their conversations Wilson began
to understand that it was feminist.
In 2016, we might easily consider the portrait
in Posturing: Male Impersonator (Butch) a successful
enactment of gender self-positioning—Wilson
appears as a challenge to binary representation,
sitting comfortably and critically within an
understood spectrum of culturally proscribed gender
indicators. But in 1973, Wilson’s impersonation
of a man was a failure confirmed by the first
cisgender man she encountered on her brave,
if brief, foray into a public restroom: a barked
command—“Get out”—marked the entire span
of her performance. With their crafty ambiguity,
Wilson’s 1970s activities, impulses, and priorities
continue to reflect feminist sensibilities that
resonate in many photographic practices today.

— Catherine Morris is Sackler Family Curator

of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist
Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Martha Wilson,
Posturing: Male
Catherine Morris
Impersonator (Butch),
1973/2008 Photography’s emergence as a vital medium
Courtesy the artist in alternative practices, particularly conceptual
and P.P.O.W. art, corresponds with the growth of the women’s
liberation movement in the United States and
Europe in the 1960s. Women artists interested in
documenting themselves and their lived experience
aligned easily with feminism. Photography,
seemingly a less fraught medium for women artists
to take up—since it lacked entrenched historical
baggage and engaged fewer heavily invested
male egos—offered flexible and unencumbered
opportunities outside traditional studio practices.
Conceptual- and performance-based actions,
such as those documented by Martha Wilson,
utilized the medium in distinctly unpretentious
and utilitarian ways. While the photograph
Posturing: Male Impersonator (Butch) (1973/2008) is
deceptive, what it isn’t, according to most viewers
and Wilson herself, is convincing in its posturing.
The initial task Wilson set up for her in-drag self

AP E RTURE 24
 Zanele Muholi For me, it goes beyond just the marriage;
it goes beyond just this beautiful family portrait.
All that I do is about advocacy: it’s about visual It becomes a political process. We capture these
activism; it’s about pushing an agenda; and it just images for posterity. We are enjoying all these
happens that photography is an easy means of freedoms now, and these kinds of visuals then
articulation. So for those who don’t understand inform many people beyond just the LGBT
what’s going on, they get to see and have an community—the different institutions that use
understanding, and maybe those who are curious the marriage for education, or use the marriage
get to ask questions. to further their own organizational agendas.
In South Africa, we legalized same-sex
— Zanele Muholi is a photographer and visual
marriages under the Civil Union Act of 2006.
We set a good example as Africans within the activist based in South Africa.
continent by giving this human right to those who
want to practice same-sex marriage, and who also
want to live their lives as recognized spouses—
as human beings. But, as we celebrate this tenth
anniversary, we also remember those we have lost
along the way due to hate crimes. Visibility becomes
the key element in all of this.
How do these wedding pictures connect with
many other things that I do? I work in categories.
I take images of weddings and juxtapose them
next to funerals of the LGBT human beings who
are being butchered on a daily basis. As I write,
there was a seventeen-year-old who was killed on
Saturday, August 6, in North West province. Even
as you want to embrace these same-sex marriages,
you can’t forget that there is so much violence that
is happening at the same time. The violence blurs
all the milestones.
Consider those couples who are in the open.
They have a white wedding in societies where
queerphobia, transphobia, lesbophobia, and
Zanele Muholi, Ayanda
homophobia is still rife. People are risking their
Moremi & Abakhaphi II.
Kwanele Park, Katlehong,
lives—and yet, at the same time, helping many
November 9, 2013 who are benefiting from those coming-out sessions.
© the artist and courtesy You cross your fingers, and hope after photographing
Stevenson, Cape Town a wedding that nothing happens to those people
and Johannesburg, and who got married, because you don’t want to feel
Yancey Richardson Gallery, as if you outed them, but to say that the people who
New York are already out just happen to be there.

WORDS 25
Laurie Simmons
My series How We See (2015) is partly concerned
with directives in language and the expectations
imposed by pronouns like he, she, it, they, them.
There is an assumption of universality in this title—
black and white, boys and girls, chocolate and
vanilla. In How We See, I am directing a viewer
how to see while asking that they attempt to make
eye contact with women who can’t gaze back.
The subjects’ closed eyelids have realistic eyes
painted on them by makeup artists Landy Dean
and James Kaliardos. While shooting, I thought
carefully about formal methods of portraiture that
put forward conventional roles, like school photos
and engagement announcements.
Each one of the models I posed in this series
presents a very glamorous version of feminine
beauty. Two of the models are trans women. Social
media allows us to perform identity, to put forward
our most desirable versions of ourselves while
simultaneously questioning the nature of those
desires—our deepest yearnings and vulnerabilities.
I certainly think about the shifting and fluid nature
of gender roles and identity in how we present
ourselves online. The possibilities for constructing
a visual, physical, and theoretical identity are
overwhelming at the moment. Social media also
allows us a level of control in our presentation of
self that isn’t always possible in real life. How do we
reconcile the personal with the public? What does
it mean to show the face you were born with? Does
such a thing still exist?

— Laurie Simmons is an artist, photographer,

and filmmaker based in New York.

Laurie Simmons,
How We See/Peche (Pink),
2015
Courtesy the artist
and Salon 94

AP E RTURE 26
Cindy Sherman, Johanna Fateman mode. Now, her work is inevitably in the mix.
Untitled #571, 2016 While Sherman’s striking images have taken on
Courtesy the artist and
Cindy Sherman’s recent show at Metro Pictures in a new aura of permanence—her dye-sublimation
Metro Pictures, New York
New York refreshed her legendary status, invoking metal prints slyly evoke, say, the durable panels
her perennially cited, prescient, and game-changing of photographic abstraction used for modern decor
series Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) while breaking in hotel lobbies—they’re not so unlike the zillions
new ground. The new photographs, from 2016, of snaps that are born in a phone, live in a feed,
comprise an almost parallel indexical series. They and die in the cloud.
are imprecisely but evocatively referential portrayals In Public, Private, Secret, last summer’s
of actresses—not the starlet types of her black-and- inaugural show for the International Center
white Stills, but women-beyond-a-certain-age of Photography’s new location on the Bowery,
from Hollywood’s golden era, played (as always, in New York, Sherman’s Untitled (1979)—a film
in Sherman’s work) by the artist herself, who is noir–ish image of the artist in a platinum wig and
now in her early sixties. sunglasses, painting her toenails and smoking on
Ungracefully aging, some would say, the a leafy patio—was installed next to a fifteen-minute
women she depicts are ultramaquillaged and looping video of hands flipping through Kim
unflattered by the period’s thin arched eyebrows, Kardashian West’s Selfish (2015), a book of selfie
dark lips, and tight ringlets. One thinks of the abject photography celebrating a particular aesthetic—or
comeback narrative of Sunset Boulevard (1950)— lifestyle—of enhanced naturalism. It’s not a straight
but also of Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures shot between these works, of course, but rather a
(1963), with its incantatory drag flamboyance. If long and winding road. Over the past four decades,
Sherman, throughout her career of shape-shifting, authenticity and artificiality have been forever
has profited from a particular versatility—the dislodged as poles of self-portraiture, thanks,
screen- or vessel-like neutrality bestowed on white in large part, to Sherman’s career-spanning oeuvre
femininity—she now exploits its expiration date. of serial exploration and incremental variation.
In contrast to her treatment of the portraits’ But the implicit feminism of her work—its wily
backgrounds (they are highly manipulated), she’s deconstructionist transgression—is a quality not
done little to filter the signs of aging from her face, always shared by the proliferation of recent art so
neck, and hands. Past that “certain age,” we find indebted to hers. Instantaneity, oversharing, and the
she’s more specific, less malleable, more “herself.” garnering of likes are new, often gendered demands
The show was a reminder that, as the artist generated by social-media platforms, but the
continues to draw from a pop-culture reservoir infiltration and disruption of such image trafficking
of images, she adds to it, too. Her self-sufficient is not (certainly not only) a young woman’s game.
studio practice, an awfully influential tradition of
something like anti-self-portraiture, was once a — Johanna Fateman is a writer, musician,
harbinger of social media’s defining representational and owner of Seagull Salon in New York.

WORDS 27
Zackary Drucker
When I was fourteen years old, I shoplifted a copy
of Kate Bornstein’s book Gender Outlaw from
Barnes & Noble. I don’t know what possessed
me, but I discovered a whole way of thinking about
gender that I never knew was possible, that was
so accessible and easy to understand. I realized that
I was a part of that legacy.
As a trans woman, I was exposed to so few
images of other trans people in my early years.
Representations of trans people were limited to
talk shows. You had these early pioneers jumping
into the lion’s den. Just so brave. It was a really
popular theme in the 1990s, the reveal that
somebody you’d had sex with was actually born—
assigned—male at birth, and there would be a
scandalous moment when they announced they
were not who they said they were. That kind of scene
was probably my only exposure to the possibility
of a gender that wasn’t just cis male or female.
For too long, our history has been concealed
and hard to find. We’re just now starting to uncover
these archetypal moments of perseverance. My
work with Holly Woodlawn, Vaginal Davis, Kate
Bornstein, these trans elders, fairy godmothers,
has been key to understanding my own life as
sustainable. Art making can provide a space for
intergenerational bonding. That was how I became between, we’re moving toward a horizon where Leonard Fink, Marsha
close to Flawless Sabrina, a performer, activist, people are free from the gender binary. That’s Johnson and Sylvia Rivera
and maker of the trailblazing 1968 documentary coming with the next generation, for whom the at NYC Gay Pride Parade,
The Queen, whose archive I’m now helping to Internet and social media are really important sites June 24, 1973
preserve. For me, these relationships have always for community formation. Courtesy the LGBT
Community Center National
been proof that it’s possible to live outside of the But even as the Internet has opened new
History Archive, New York
rules, to survive brutal intolerance. opportunities to project images of self-exploration
So, when I think about photography and and to connect with others, we still have to be
feminism, and trans feminism, I also think trans vigilant. I’ve been thinking about the Pakistani
feminism is an extension of the work that women social-media star Qandeel Baloch, who was
have been doing for centuries, the work that murdered in July by her brother in an honor killing.
feminists and queer activists have been doing to We are living in a globalized world, where all of the
fight for equal rights. I think about those amazing atrocities and freedoms of other nations are in our
archival images of the activists Sylvia Rivera and visual realm, right in front of us, on our screens, in
Marsha P. Johnson, protesting with their group our hands. It’s imperative that we set a precedent of
STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) liberation, of women having autonomous identities,
in the early 1970s at the Christopher Street parade. selves, sexualities, agency over our representation,
They ostensibly ignited the Stonewall riots in 1969, and not having our bodies regulated by men. You
yet they were very quickly erased from the early know, trans people are still not fully protected as
history of the Gay Liberation Front. citizens. We are part of a long fight, a long struggle.
It’s astounding to measure the progress we’ve
made over the past, say, fifty years. As the fight for — Zackary Drucker is an artist based in Los
gender equality continues, and as we’ve opened Angeles and a producer of the Amazon series
up our definitions of men, women, and folks in Transparent.

AP E RTU RE 28
 A. L. Steiner and destructive “productive” (i.e., industrialized)
labor. This has left contemporary mainstream
The patriarchy has no gender. After teaching visual feminisms largely bereft of values, insight,
arts for the past fifteen years in higher education, and foresight—a mere reflection of patriarchal
I’ve found that a majority of academics do not domination.
ascribe to any form of lived practice or social To ensure that schools continue to be places
activism connected to their scholarship, and have of study, we must heed poet Fred Moten’s succinct
fully embraced a neoliberal agenda. I’ve watched analysis of the neoliberal turn, that “the university
feminist-identified academics vying exclusively for as a place for thought or as a refuge for study—
power and money, no longer for pedagogy, learning, it just doesn’t exist anymore and it’s kind of crazy
or social justice. I’ve witnessed “award-winning” to keep acting like it does.” As teachers and students
academics lie and threaten faculty for organizing self-identify with the corporatocratic notions
to change non-tenure-track pay scales, which of “service provider” and “customer,” respectively,
have been frozen since 1995. I’ve seen those the educational system devolves into an abyss
claiming various forms of “feminisms” pillage of debt, confusion, disdain, and recklessness.
funds, renege on funding and curricular offers, In the new technocratic educational model,
and lie to students, staff, faculty, and each other students and faculty are considered resource
under the guise of “competition” and “meritocracy,” drains, and human learning is saddled with the false
simplistic covers for inequity and corruption. front of analytical metrics. So we must remember
I was told explicitly that it doesn’t matter who that the etymologies of teaching and learning are
teaches the university’s classes. synonymous, stemming from the notion of lore.
“Lean in” feminism is capitalism’s handmaiden, As feminist practitioners, we must recognize and
as philosopher and author Nancy Fraser stated fully resist the tentacles of the financial class by
in the New York Times last year. Feminists such speaking truths to power, and support teaching
as Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, Grace Lee and learning in unison with art’s varied applications
Boggs, Silvia Federici, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, while remaining conscious and observant of
and Benita Roth, among others, have highlighted mechanisms of supremacy and annihilation—
Eurocentric neoliberal feminisms’ eradication of the especially within the potent image world.
fight against unpaid “reproductive” (i.e., care) labor,
noting contemporary feminism’s prioritization of — A. L. Steiner is a multimedia artist based
participation in a system of exploitative, competitive, in New York and Los Angeles.

A. L. Steiner,
Greatest Hits redux
as 4-hr. workweek (detail),
2016
Courtesy Deborah
Schamoni, Munich, and
Arcadia Missa, London

WORDS 29
 Florence Henri, Femme
aux cartes, 1930
© Martini & Ronchetti and
courtesy Archives Florence
Henri

Modern
Women
David Campany, Marta Gili, Julie Jones, and Roxana Marcoci on
the women who dominated photography between the wars

David Campany: You have all been involved with exhibitions professional photographer did not, for a long time, and especially
and publications dedicated to women photographers who then, bring specific social prestige. Moreover, this profession didn’t
began their working lives between the wars. The 1920s and require any official apprenticeship or education degree. This alone
1930s, particularly in Europe, still loom large in any history of could explain a lot, as education and legal rights of women were still
photography because of the flowering of various modernisms awfully limited. The French situation was particularly depressing:
and avant-gardes, and, of course, the expansion of the Women couldn’t vote before the end of World War II. They were
illustrated mass media and the photographic book. Perhaps not given access to secondary education equivalent to that of men
less discussed is the rich exchange between these fields. until 1924. And, married women could not register for university
Photographers moved easily right across visual culture. without spousal authorization until 1938. They also had to ask their
And it’s notable how many of the most dynamic figures were husbands for permission to be able to work until 1965! Working
women: Germaine Krull, Laure Albin-Guillot, Florence as a photographer gave a woman the possibility to run her
Henri, Grete Stern, and many others. Why was this? Was the own business and make a living that was equivalent to that of
medium open to them in a way the other arts were not? Was it a male photographer, while enabling her to liberate herself from
to do with photography at that point being a medium without conservative, bourgeois mores and lifestyles.
boundaries and categories?
Roxana Marcoci: When we speak of the interwar period, we
Julie Jones: In the 1920s and 1930s, women were indeed speak in fact of a photophilic revolution, which generated the
particularly present in the photography world. I think it’s worth emergence of new critical theories and a more porous context for
remembering that it is, at first sight, not particularly clear why a the production and distribution of photographic imagery. In the
woman would have chosen this profession: photography required 1920s, lens-based media gained expressive and economic potential
strong physical qualities; it implied rough negotiations; and it for many women as they pushed the cultural boundaries and began
demanded operating in the public sphere, which was still largely to make the transition from the heavy, fixed camera to the portable,
reserved for men. But unlike painting, sculpture, or other traditional lightweight 35mm camera, working at higher film speeds and
arts, photography was still considered at that time as minor, in part, experimenting with montage, seriality, and dynamic modes of
but not only, due to its lack of tradition. In photography circles, media production. The new culture of illustrated magazines—
amateur and professional alike, women were free of the restrictions many devoted to women, fashion, and the domestic interior—
they had to face in other art branches. The same applied to the enlisted more women photographers to contribute pictures for
publications and exhibitions they participated in. Also, being a advertisements and graphic design in mass media.

WORDS 3 1
 DC: Did photographic education also play a part in this shift?

RM: Yes, this is also a moment of historical transformation in

educational institutions where women began to play a critical role.
When the Bauhaus opened in 1919 in Weimar as a school of fine
and applied arts, with a thoroughly progressive approach through
its cross-disciplinary program, there were more women applicants
to enroll than men. Gertrud Arndt, Florence Henri, Grete Stern,
Elsa Thiemann-Franke, and others who studied photography
at the Bauhaus were also exposed to the program in typography
and advertising design then being led by Joost Schmidt. In 1922,
Lucia Moholy jointly wrote with her husband, artist and Bauhaus
theorist László Moholy-Nagy, the short manifesto “Produktion-
Reproduktion,” which precisely explored the crossover between
photography, film, and sound recording. Although Lucia was not
officially part of the Bauhaus faculty (she would be appointed at the
Reimann Schule in 1930, where she taught until 1933), she shared
her expertise in photography and played an inestimable influence
on photographers such as Florence Henri, who in 1927 attended
a summer course at the Bauhaus.

Marta Gili: Roxana, you are completely right in pointing out

the important role of the Bauhaus school in the emancipation
of these women artists. In fact, the concept of the Neue Frau,
or New Woman, was possible because under the Weimar Republic,
and probably due to the complexity of the social and political
situation, painting, photography, film, literature, theater, and
the world of the ideas were flourishing—some would say it was
chaotic and tense, but nonetheless cosmopolitan and open-minded.
The emancipation of women was, I think, a kind of consequence
of this spirit.
Germaine Krull, Nude (Nu),
ca. 1935
© Estate Germaine Krull, DC: But as the postwar histories of photography were put
Museum Folkwang, together, we overlooked the work of many of the women
Essen; CNAC/MNAM, Dist.
RMN-Grand Palais; and Art who had emerged from the Bauhaus.
Resource, New York

MG: Indeed. We should not forget that it was Ute Eskildsen,

head of the photography department at Museum Folkwang in Essen
until last year, who staged, in 1995, the most remarkable exhibition
to give them visibility. Women Photographers of the Weimar Republic
presented an astonishing range of more than fifty photographers
who were active in commercial or artistic photography in Germany
in the 1920s and 1930s. Her research was amazing. In my personal
case, this exhibition was a kind of revelation and a strong motivation
in my career, since I have committed myself, as director of the
Jeu de Paume in Paris, to giving visibility to artistic work of men
By “seizing the gaze,” women and women on an equal basis. This period between the two world
were representing themselves wars was also exciting not only in Berlin or Dessau, but also in
Paris, Budapest, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and
in a performative way. New York, just to name a few centers.

JJ: In addition to the importance of the Bauhaus for women,

I think it is worth mentioning that some women also held strategic
positions as heads of institutions. I’m thinking here particularly
about Gertrude Fehr and her photography school PUBLI-phot.
The advertisements for the school show that this institution hoped
to bring in young women, especially, as students.

DC: And after this new education?

RM: Many of the women photographers we are talking about went

on to open pioneering commercial studios, further pushing the
bounds of cross-cultural freedoms. The social model of the Neue
Frau enfranchised not just Stern, Henri, and Arndt, but also other
professional artists such as Ellen Auerbach, Marianne Brandt,

AP E RTURE 3 2
Lotte Jacobi, Germaine Krull, and Elli Marcus to experiment Below: Page 34, left:
Germaine Krull, Florence Henri,
creatively with photography, vote, enjoy sexual independence, Superstitions: Autoportrait (Self-portrait),
and operate their own studios. Henri moved to Paris in 1929, Fallen Scissors, 1929 1928
© Estate Germaine Krull, © Martini & Ronchetti
where she set up a photographic studio that would rival Man Ray’s Museum Folkwang, and and courtesy Archives
in popularity, as well as a school where Lisette Model and Gisèle courtesy Jeu de Paume Florence Henri
Freund, among others, enrolled. Ilse Bing contributed pictures Page 34, right:
Florence Henri, Portrait
to Das Illustrierte Blatt, a monthly supplement of the illustrated Composition, Lore,
magazine Frankfurter Illustrierte. In 1930, she moved to Paris, ca. 1935
© Martini & Ronchetti
where her circle of acquaintances included Henri Cartier-Bresson, and courtesy Archives
Man Ray, and Brassaï, and where she came to be known as Queen Florence Henri
Page 35:
of the Leica for her skill with the handheld camera. Toshiko Okanoue,
In Love, 1953
DC: Stern and Auerbach joined forces. © the artist and courtesy
the Museum of Modern Art,
New York
RM: Yes, embracing both commercial and avant-garde work.
In 1930, they established ringl + pit, a feminist commercial studio
in Berlin (it was named for their childhood nicknames: Ringl
for Stern, Pit for Auerbach). They coauthored their production,
fostering a groundbreaking artistic alliance that subverted the
clichéd cult of the master, and which led to several productive
commissions. Their foto-reklamen (photo-sign advertising) defied
the stiff-upper-lip style that had become the norm for German
advertising photography in the early 1920s.

DC: Germaine Krull was one of the most widely published

photographers of this period. One can hardly pick up a
journal from that time, be it mainstream or avant-garde,
without coming across her photographs. Plus, she was
publishing all manner of photographically illustrated books.

RM: Krull made her breakthrough in 1928 when she was hired as
a staff photographer at the nascent Paris-based weekly magazine
VU, which would eventually publish 281 of her pictures in seventy
issues. Along with André Kertész and Éli Lotar, she took radically
modernist pictures that formed a new kind of photojournalism,
one rooted in freedom of expression and closeness to her subjects—
all facilitated by her small-format Icarette camera. During this
period she also published Métal (1928), a series of sixty-four images
of modernist industrial architecture and engineering, shot in
muscular close-up and from vertiginous angles, and took her
signature portraits, including one of the cultural critic Walter
Benjamin, who praised Krull for her radical visual aesthetics,
aligning her with New Objectivity photographers such as Karl
Blossfeldt and August Sander.

DC: Marta, at the Jeu de Paume you have presented major

shows of the work of Florence Henri, Germaine Krull,
and Laure Albin-Guillot. Of those three, Albin-Guillot was
probably the least known by contemporary audiences. Her
oeuvre is a personal favorite of mine. Like Krull, she is truly
prodigious, but the variety of her work is extraordinary.
Advertising, industrial photography, nudes, portraiture,
architectural photography, scientific photography, image-
text experiments. There’s no signature style at all, and no
signature images for which she’s known. I get the impression
that until recently historians have had a difficult time making
sense of the breadth of her achievements.

MG: Albin-Guillot is a very special case. She started making

photographs when she was almost forty years old, but quickly
achieved great recognition in Paris with, as you say, portraiture,
advertising, illustration, experimentation, design, and by publishing
many books. Her renown came in 1931 with her stupefying album
Micrographie Décorative, photographs of abstract microscopic
preparations, printed on colored and metallic papers.

WORDS 3 3
JJ: One important thing to bear in mind, while thinking about installation was striking: self-portraits and representations of
this period for women photographers, is that the proliferation women by a variety of women practitioners was a recurring motif.
of images in the 1920s and 1930s fully contributed to the advent By “seizing the gaze,” women were representing themselves
of new forms of consumption and encouraged the cultivation in a performative way and not just as “models (objects) in this
of the cult of appearance. Women were then omnipresent image world,” as Julie aptly put it. These certainly added to
as models (objects) in this image world. Professional women the proliferation of images (the entropic rule of photography),
photographers didn’t appear to want to change this type of but not simply, not always, to encourage new forms of consumption,
objectification. When we study their pictures, it is very clear that or the cult of appearance.
searching for any sort of specifically feminine gaze, technique,
or subject matter is completely futile. Rather, they definitely used MG: In a completely different aesthetic and political approach,
the same tools, moved through the same networks, and reached we cannot forget the great Claude Cahun, born Lucy Schwob, using
out to the same public as their male counterparts, without playing her own body as a material to challenge the clichés of feminine and
on differences. masculine identity. Her self-portraits have aroused great interest
among theoreticians of contemporary culture.
DC: So there is little that is explicitly feminist being expressed
by this work. Rather, is there an implicit feminism in the RM: Claude Cahun was also a writer, an actress in small vanguard
sheer fact that so many of those women were playing such theater productions, and an outspoken member of the lesbian
a dynamic and active part in that new photophilic visual community of Paris between the wars. She and her stepsister,
culture? Suzanne Malherbe, became partners in life and art, and took
the ambiguously gendered pseudonyms of Claude Cahun and
RM: I think Julie is making a perceptive observation here. The Marcel Moore for their collaborative theatrical and photographic
whole question of agency and reception—who these women works. A witty observer of the multifaceted and conflicting
photographers were speaking to—is critical. In most cases, I would sociopolitical conditions of the interwar period, Cahun understood
agree that a feminist agency was not explicit, and it’s shocking to the importance of cross-dressing and masks in constructing
recall that women in France did not have voting rights until 1944. identity. “Under this mask, another mask,” she wrote. “I will
But, I’d like to make a counterargument. In 2010, I cocurated, never finish removing all these faces.” Cahun jotted these words
with two other colleagues at the Museum of Modern Art, Pictures by on one of the photomontages in her 1930 book Aveux non avenus
Women: A History of Modern Photography. It was an exhibition drawn (Disavowals), which outlines her interest in role-playing, masking,
completely from the museum’s collection and presented the history and doubling. She shaved her head and posed in a variety of
of the medium from the dawn of the modern period to the present male costumes, ranging from a stylish dandy to a conventionally
with more than two hundred works by 120 artists. It filled the entire suited civil servant, but she also fashioned a feminine, puppetlike
third floor of the photography galleries. A particular aspect of the persona using the artifice of dress, makeup, and masks.

AP E RTURE 3 4
DC: Roxana, your 2015 MoMA exhibition From Bauhaus
to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola hinted
at Stern working in ways similar to Cahun.

RM: In a protofeminist scrapbook titled Ringlpitis that Ellen

Auerbach offered to Grete Stern on her birthday in 1931, the two
photographed each other in full masquerade, through makeup,
cross-dressing, and gender-bending poses. They put on roles and
took them off at will, enacting androgyny and dandyism in the
transgressive tradition of actionist work, and they explored the
edgy, masculinized identity of the Weimar Neue Frau, considered
a global icon of modernity, a close cousin of the French garçonne
or hommesse and the American flapper. Like Hannah Höch, the
sole female member of the Berlin Dada group, whose provocative
montages of Weimar women with cutout pictures of tribal masks
challenged European gender definitions and racist and colonialist
ideas, ringl + pit explored alternative models of the feminine that
had emerged out of the sociopolitical upheavals of the Weimar
Republic through their construction of humorous masquerades.
These entailed mixing sartorial props to lampoon generational
differences regarding sexuality; playing with mirror reflections
to fragment the seamless image of femininity; and using montage
to expose the stereotypical view of woman as commodity. The
theatricality of these new forms of portraiture and self-portraiture
would pave the way for the feminist performances of the early
1970s when the women’s liberation movement took center stage.
Through performance, the concept of woman could be debated,
an idea complicated by class, ethnicity, sexual inclination, and other
facets of identity.

JJ: Roxana’s right. Major examples of this type of emancipation

are to be found in several women’s photographs produced in
the artistic milieu. The lack of an apparent feminist claim seems
to appear more clearly in the commercial work of professional
women photographers. I am thinking especially about the
portrait studio, advertising, reportage, or nude photography.
This can probably be explained by the fact that they wished
to answer the professional imperatives of the trade, meeting
the requirements and tastes of publishers, clients, and the
general public. This nonfeminist vision may also have been
encouraged by the editors of publications: most of the time,
images by woman professional photographers were published
side by side with those made by and credited to men, in the same
article. Their feminine authorship was not especially pointed
out to readers.

MG: I definitely think that using the term feminism is not accurate
in this context, since it is always misinterpreted. It is essential
today to distinguish a female artist from a feminist artist. In the
1920s and 1930s, the concept of feminism, as we know it in the
later decades of the twentieth century, had not yet been invented.
For me, feminism, as a Western construction coming from the
political struggles from the 1960s, is mainly a political term.
It is our contemporary reception of the work of these women from
the 1920s and 1930s that could give us the possibility of analyzing
some of their work from feminist perspectives—as Roxana
suggested, looking at some performative works of Cahun, Henri,
Opposite: This page, top: This page, bottom:
and others. I agree with what Abigail Solomon-Godeau once said: Laure Albin-Guillot, Ilse Bing, Self-Portrait Claude Cahun (Lucy
“Any work of culture is susceptible to feminist reading and feminist Bijoux (ensemble bracelet, in Mirrors, 1931 Schwob) and Marcel
analysis.” As curators and art historians, we are adding to the artists’ bague et clip) (Jewelry © The Ilse Bing Estate Moore (Suzanne Malherbe),
set with bracelet, ring, and courtesy Edwynn Houk Untitled, 1921–22
work many different layers of meaning. Audiences are doing exactly and clip), France, 1942 Gallery and the Museum © Estate of Claude Cahun
the same, too. What is for me essential is that everybody should © Laure Albin-Guillot/ of Modern Art, New York and courtesy the Museum
Roger-Viollet of Modern Art, New York
consider themselves feminist, but still today only 10 to 20 percent
of the work in the exhibition programs of the biggest museums
in the world is by female artists.

WORDS 3 7
Top: Bottom: DC: The expanded Tate Modern in London has just reopened
Grete Stern, Autorretrato ringl + pit, Walter and
(Self-portrait), 1943 Ellen Auerbach, 1931 with a mandate for a fifty-fifty balance between men and
© Estate of Horacio © Estate of Horacio women artists, set within much more global narratives
Coppola, Buenos Aires, Coppola, Buenos Aires
and courtesy the Museum
of culture and modernity.
of Modern Art, New York It seems from the writing of photographic history
(and I stress “seems”) that there are so-called moments when
the work of women photographers has been exceptionally
significant: the 1850s to the 1870s, the 1920s to the 1930s,
and the 1960s to the 1970s. Three very different moments.
One would certainly get this impression from recent
histories, such as at the survey exhibition Who’s Afraid of
Women Photographers?, presented at the Musée d’Orsay
and the Orangerie in Paris last year (although that show
stopped at 1945). Is this idea of moments of intensity just
a form of art historical shorthand? Or is there something
more substantial at stake?

RM: In a schematic way, photography from the 1850s to 1870s

How do we go about unsettling offered access to a “new vision,” along with a technical apparatus
established art historical for image making that displaced male virtuosity and manual skill
as the exclusive measures of artistic identity. The experimentation
narratives? Activating new that took place at the fringes of modernism in the 1920s and
readings? Unfixing the canon? 1930s ultimately defined the period as much as, if not more than,
the activities taking place at its center. In the 1960s and 1970s, the
advent of gender theory and feminist performance meant that the
concept of woman began to be debated and complicated by class,
ethnicity, sexual inclination, and other facets of identity politics.

JJ: It is difficult to give a satisfying answer in a few words. These

three moments are definitely highlighted by recent histories of
photography, when considering women’s production does seem
to be largely a historical shorthand. I see this process as a logical
consequence: the gradual rediscovery of female photographers
tends to follow a general tendency in photographic studies
that shows a major interest for nineteenth-century primitive
photography (1850s to 1870s), the experimental avant-gardes
(1920s to 1930s), and early postmodernism (1960s to 1970s).
These three moments have been, and still are, of great interest
to women’s studies. But this approach also seems too reductive.

MG: I totally agree with Julie. We have to be careful. From my point of

view, women artists and women photographers have always been active.
Our contemporary interest in women in the history of photography,
and in the arts in general, could be related also to the contributions
of gender studies (with their contradictions and complexities),
which, to my understanding, have revolutionized important issues
such as identity, work, family, democracy, social conflict, and more.

DC: We’ve talked a lot about how current attitudes shape our
understanding of the past. Can you each say a little about how
this has shaped your research and presentation of the work
of some of these photographers?

RM: The idea of visibility and re-visioning is critical. At MoMA there

is a Modern Women’s group, consisting of curators and affiliated
colleagues, that thinks a lot about these questions: How do we go
about unsettling established art historical narratives? Activating
new readings? Unfixing the canon? Researching counterhistories?
Expressing transnational synchronicities? Constructing resistance?
Opening to alternative models of solidarity? Envisioning oppositional
practices? Proposing unexpected linkages? Investigating why
particular lacunae subsist? Critiquing from inside the institutions
in which we work? Envisioning the political extent of our scholarly
jobs? All this translates in our continuous ability to respond
(“response-ability”).

AP E RTU RE 3 8
ringl + pit, spread
from Ringlpitis, 1931
© Estate of Horacio
Coppola, Buenos Aires

Ten years ago, in Japan, I came across the little-known work same problem within the other mediums, but it certainly broadens
of Japanese artist Toshiko Okanoue, whose short production— things. This summer, I curated Il y a de l’autre / Where the Other
from 1951 to 1956—is remarkable. In Love, from 1953, which Rests for the Rencontres de la Photographie, in Arles, France,
is now in MoMA’s collection, is a rather poignant example of with the artist Agnès Geoffray. The exhibition presents as many
the kind of exclusions that can occur at the core of the feminist female as male artists. We didn’t look consciously to do this.
project. We often think of gender issues in terms of women artists I’m happy that it naturally happened. And I hope that this will
from the western hemisphere, but here was an artist whose work happen more often, consciously or not, in the work of male and
In Love—a surreal collage, cannibalizing images from American female curators alike.
magazines such as Life and Vogue, which were available to her
at a used bookstore in the immediate postwar years in Japan—
represented a young Japanese woman’s perception of the Western
way of life. Recalibrating history is a delicate act of empathy
and emphasis.

MG: In my case, Jeu de Paume, at the heart of Paris on Place de

la Concorde, has become a symbolic and precious instrument
for generating exhibitions and public/educational programs
that make gender parity an ordinary, legitimate, and democratic
contemporary gesture. I think that the message has been received—
it is not complicated, it is not more expensive, it maintains large
audiences. We have become an institution of reference for curators
and scholars who believe what the Spanish poet Antonio Machado
wrote: “Walker, there is no road, / the road is made by walking.”

JJ: I recently curated an exhibition with Karolina Ziebinska-

˛ ´
Lewandowska on women professional photographers from
the 1920s and the 1930s for the Centre Pompidou Málaga. We
focused on artists from the Pompidou collection. More than 90
percent of them happened to be from the Christian Bouqueret
collection, acquired by the Pompidou in 2012 (about 7,500 works). Julie Jones is Assistant Curator in the
Photography Department of the Musée
What struck me was the number of relatively unknown female
national d’art modern, Centre Pompidou,
practitioners in this important collection. Paris.
The problem appears to me to be very different when we David Campany’s books include the
Aperture titles The Open Road: Photography Roxana Marcoci is Senior Curator in the
consider more contemporary artists. Maybe it’s because of the and the American Road Trip (2014) Department of Photography of the Museum
fact that contemporary practices of photography seem to be less and Walker Evans (2015). of Modern Art, New York. She is currently
at work on a survey exhibition of Louise
restricted to the photographic field and are more linked to the Marta Gili is Director of Jeu de Paume Lawler’s work, WHY PICTURES NOW,
art world in its larger sense. I’m not saying that we don’t find the in Paris. opening at MoMA in April 2017.

WORDS 3 9
In the 1970s, as the struggle for gender equality
transformed the United States and Europe, pioneering
women artists pushed to reframe the female body.

The
Feminist
Avant-Garde
Nancy Princenthal

It seems that it’s time, once again, to consider the naked truths
revealed by second-wave feminist art. In 2007, a year of women
in the arts was spearheaded by WACK! Art and the Feminist
Revolution, a traveling exhibition of women’s art from the 1970s
organized by Connie Butler for the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Los Angeles. That year also saw Global Feminisms, at the
Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art’s two-day
symposium “The Feminist Future.” Traveling since 2010, the
exhibition Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works from the
Sammlung Verbund, Vienna returns to the achievements of that
formative decade. An assembly of photo-based work by thirty-four
artists, the exhibition was organized by Gabriele Schor, who is also
editor of the accompanying publication discussed here (its other
primary authors are Mechtild Widrich and Merle Radtke; there
are numerous additional contributors of shorter texts). Schor’s aim,
she writes, is simply to “draw the connection between the concepts
Lynn Hershman Leeson, of ‘feminism’ and ‘avant-garde’”—that is, to challenge the idea
Roberta Construction
Chart #1, 1975
that at the leading edge of culture there is always a battalion
© the artist of men.

AP E RTURE 40
 In her catalogue essay, Schor divides the artists into a
Borgesian list of incommensurate, sometimes overlapping, and
yet productive categories, including “Bride/Marriage/Sexuality,”
“Homemaker/Wife/Mother,” “Role-Play,” “The Dictate
of Beauty,” and “Violence Against Women.” There is also
“Measurement,” as both an artistic strategy and a social constraint,
and, more obscurely, “Critique of Reification,” which sets
“the female body in opposition to institutions and architecture.”
Some of these linkages comprise curatorial tours de force:
Donna Henes, Françoise Janicot, Renate Eisenegger, and
Annegret Soltau are all shown to have wrapped their heads
in various binding materials; Elaine Shemilt did the same to
her body. Birgit Jürgenssen and Helen Chadwick both devised
Seen forty years later, these full-body costumes that took the form of kitchen appliances,
many exercises in self-exposure while Ulrike Rosenbach posed at a kitchen stove wearing one
of a series of marital “bonnets,” and Martha Rosler produced the
have grown increasingly hilariously deadpan Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975). Lynn Hershman
complicated—often raw and Leeson’s commitment to her alter ego, Roberta Breitmore,
was extraordinary—for several years, Roberta had an independent
innocent, sometimes angry. and fully credentialed personal and professional life, and even
her own psychotherapist—but Hershman Leeson was only one
among a host of artists who undertook role-play to explore the
dramatis personae of womanhood. Other themes are likewise
substantiated.
Schor, however, declines to situate them in a lineage that
includes precedents and successors. A compendium, then,
rather than a polemic, this book nonetheless offers strongly
provocative gatherings, primary among them the abundance of
women turning the camera on themselves. As noted in Widrich’s
catalogue essay, art historian Rosalind Krauss’s “The Aesthetics
of Narcissism,” an article that appeared in the first issue of
the influential journal October, in 1976, identified a prevailing
“narcissism” in the nascent medium of video art. Widrich claims
that Krauss “disparages … a preoccupation with the artist’s own
self.” But rather than actually exploring such preoccupations,
malign or otherwise, Krauss applies the term narcissism to structures
of perceptual relation. Similarly, fellow art historian Anne Wagner’s
“Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” written nearly
twenty-five years later for October and also cited by Widrich, is,
like “The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” concerned with the nature
of photographic address, although Wagner explicitly counters
Krauss by noting the preponderance of early video work that directs
the camera, often rather aggressively, at its audience as well as,
or instead of, at its creator.
Renate Bertlmann,
Tender Touches, 1976
Both essays, it should be said, focus mainly on work by men—
© the artist and courtesy they include Vito Acconci (a focus in each case), Richard Serra,
Richard Saltoun Gallery
Bruce Nauman, Peter Campus, Robert Morris, and Bill Viola,
along with Joan Jonas and Lynda Benglis (Wagner also discusses
Laurie Anderson). And although the writers’ attention to the
question of narcissism sheds valuable light on women’s use of video
and photography in the 1970s, it is an oblique kind of illumination.
In the artworks Feminist Avant-Garde celebrates, the medium
of photography—whether video or still, documentation of a live
performance or freestanding—is less an object of interest in itself
than a device for recording personal experiences, and in particular
the experience of having a female body. More specifically still,
in a great number of cases the camera found these artists with
their clothes off. Those shown nude include fully half the artists
in the exhibition, among them Eleanor Antin, Lynda Benglis,
Lili Dujourie, Birgit Jürgenssen, Ana Mendieta, Rita Myers,
ORLAN, Ewa Partum, Ulrike Rosenbach, Martha Rosler,
Carolee Schneemann, and Hannah Wilke; shown mostly nude,
or exposing their genitals, are Valie Export, Cindy Sherman
(in an early, uncharacteristic work), Martha Wilson, and
Francesca Woodman.

AP E RTURE 42
 Suzy Lake, Imitations
of Myself, 1973
© the artist and courtesy
Georgia Scherman Projects,
Toronto

WORDS 43
Birgit Jürgenssen,
Ich möchte hier raus!
(I want out of here!), 1976
© Estate Birgit Jürgenssen
and courtesy Galerie
Hubert Winter, Vienna,
and Bildrecht, Vienna

AP E RTURE 44
 In her conclusion, Schor claims “self-deprecation and humor
were important strategies” for the women she brought together,
and that is certainly true of some—for instance, Antin’s rueful
exercise in “carving” her body (through scrupulously documented
dieting) and Benglis’s arch sendups of Hollywood cheesecake.
Straightforward expressions of spirit and pleasure are important
too; Wilke is probably the poster girl for defiantly flaunting
physical beauty. But, seen forty years later, these many exercises
in self-exposure have grown, it seems to me, increasingly
complicated—often raw and innocent, sometimes angry,
occasionally abashed. Mendieta and Woodman both caused their
breasts to be seen painfully distorted by panes of glass, and their
bodies to be placed in various positions of acute vulnerability—
most dramatically in Mendieta’s searing photographic work
Untitled (Rape Scene) from 1973. Myers’s presentations of her
“better” and “worse” halves show her standing stone-faced and
stiff, as if for a full-body mug shot. In the well-known documentation
of her performance Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969), for which
a gun-toting Export spread her legs to reveal a hole cut into
her pants at the crotch, the artist presents us with a scowl as
wary and fearful as it is aggressive. Even the generally irrepressible
Wilke allowed herself to be seen as vulnerable, not only in the
late photographs in which her body is ravaged by cancer, but also,
for instance, in the guarded crouch she assumes in So Help Me
Hannah: Snatch-shots with Ray Guns (1978). At the time they were
made, these admittedly complicated and heterogeneous images
of self-disclosure were all understood to be, primarily, acts of
proud defiance. In this respect, it is helpful to go back to Krauss,
because the poststructuralist criticism of the kind she so forcefully
propounded, with its scathing disdain for lived experience (men’s
as well as women’s), and its “bracketing out” (to use a term favored
by Krauss) of emotional and physical life, is what women were up
against. Despite the reliance on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan,
such criticism rendered women’s full psychological lives invisible Hannah Wilke, Marxism
and Art: Beware of Fascist
even to female critics. Feminism, 1977
Perhaps not surprisingly, the headlong rush to disrobe was © Hannah Wilke Collection
& Archive, Los Angeles/
brief. Most of the women who were leaders of the deconstructivism Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon,
that arose in the following decade turned the camera away from and Andrew Scharlatt and
courtesy Bildrecht, Vienna
themselves, using the codes of commercial photography to subvert
the media’s framing of gender. Even when the women who were
at the forefront of the Pictures Generation—including Sarah
Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman,
Laurie Simmons, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems—
featured themselves in their photoworks, they chose not to
portray themselves nude. And as the art world opened, in the 1990s,
to an awareness of non-Western cultural traditions and values,
it was recognized that being covered up—indeed being clothed The notion that “male” and
nearly head to toe, as are some Muslim women—can be a positive
choice, and its violation a form of oppression. But perhaps, too,
“female” are fixed categories,
the discomfort that is still, or newly, caused by the variously naked and that the landscape of
artworks of the 1970s reveals an alarming return of repression,
a squeamishness styling itself as sophistication. In any case, seeing gender is divided between
this work again is deeply instructive, and powerful in ways perhaps
not originally intended.
them, has been thoroughly
If this wholesale baring of the self still seems provocative, discredited.
some of the battle lines drawn by female artists in the 1970s
appear less revolutionary now. The ways conventional heterosexual
couples struggle to manage domestic chores is hardly different
from arrangements made by same-sex couples, male or female,
and although more women than men still stay home to care
for infants, and disparity across the board remains a pressing
concern, work/life issues are now understood to involve class
as much as sex—a triumph, perhaps, of feminism. Similarly,
the commodification of women’s bodies and the pressure to be
alluring remain important issues, but again, they are mitigated

WORDS 45
by both greater pushback and the recognition that such pressures charismatic politician-cum-shaman who proudly wielded
are not restricted to women. considerable real-world power. Acconci, on the other hand,
By the same token, the notion that “male” and “female” was determined, especially in his years as a performance artist,
are fixed categories, and that the landscape of gender is divided to dodge such power, using his own considerable (if decidedly
between them, has been pretty thoroughly discredited in recent unconventional) charm to explore body and soul at their most
years. There is little evidence of that change in this book. naked. Stripping off his clothes, burning his hair, biting his flesh,
Admittedly, it covers a period in which the dismantling of the and rubbing his skin until it bled, alternately taunting viewers
gender binary was yet to come, but it is still very odd that LGBT and prostrating himself before them, he exhibited a brave (and still
identities and rights do not come up at all. Nor do those of race, very disturbing) willingness to recognize the less amiable aspects
in a volume that represents only white women, almost all from of being embodied. It is by illustrating the vivid legacy of women
Europe and the United States. Where, in the Sammlung’s collection, who propelled this impulse, using their own physical and emotional
or in this publication, is Lorraine O’Grady? Adrian Piper? Camille lives to examine the full range of personal experience rather
Billops? Theresa Hak Kyung Cha? This disregard is most glaring than—as is sometimes thought—generalizing expressions
in a section of Schor’s essay called “Whiteface,” which features of collective strength, that Schor’s publication makes its most
the (white) artists Martha Wilson, Cindy Sherman, and Suzy Lake, valuable contribution.
among others. In describing the images that fall under this heading,
of work by women who “made up their faces with white foundation
for the process of transformation,” Schor writes that “the basic effect
of whiteface is to neutralize the artist’s own identity.” Not a word
is said about actual skin color and its ramifications.
For American readers and viewers, another bias of note,
this one positive and instructive, is toward European artists and
Continental points of reference. A touchstone for Schor’s essay,
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (published in 1949 in France
and in 1953 in the United States), differs from the founding texts of
1960s and 1970s feminism in America—Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique (1963), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970)—by its mandarin
tone, its political and philosophical commitments (to socialism and
existentialism), and its historical scope, which spans the globe and
reaches to antiquity. While it is profoundly rousing, it is not a call
to action. It also stakes out a chronology of feminism that differs
from the one generally followed in the United States. Beauvoir’s
book supports Schor’s statement that the artists gathered in this
publication, who were born between 1933 and 1958, spent “their
childhood and teenage years [in] what we might call the long 1950s.”
In this view, the culture in which feminism emerged was shaped
by the left’s challenge to a rising capitalism, and by the lingering
shadow of World War II. Figures who negotiated those forces—
preeminently, for German speakers, Joseph Beuys—were lodestars.
“Joseph Beuys’s actions in Germany … were important experiences
for many women artists,” Schor writes, noting, for instance,
that Ulrike Rosenbach had studied with Beuys, who “explicitly
conceived of his appearances as a form of mythmaking.” While
insisting that everyone is an artist, and that the boundary-crossing
practice of “social sculpture” is a kind of activism-as-art available
to all, Beuys put his highly dramatized personal story to work
in consolidating his authority as a performance artist, sculptor,
and teacher, and ultimately as a founder of the leftist Green Party
in Germany.
Opposite, clockwise
But looked at, instead, from the perspective of the many artists from top left:
included in this publication who came of age in what was perhaps Penny Slinger, ICU, Eye
Sea You, I See You, 1973;
an even longer 1960s, the prevailing influences are different—
Cindy Sherman, Magic
and they shift to the United States. While Schor sees the 1960s Time, 1975; Lynda Benglis,
as dominated by “critique of the capitalist-imperialist economic SELF, 1970–76; Ana
Mendieta, Untitled (Glass
system,” in America the most pressing issues were surely the civil on Body Imprints), 1972
rights movement and the Vietnam War. Mobilization for the first © the artist and courtesy
Gallery Broadway 1602,
and against the second clearly set the stage here for the feminism New York; © the artist and
of the 1970s. courtesy of Metro Pictures,
Nancy Princenthal teaches art writing New York; © the artist
If Beuys is key to socially oriented performance work in at the School of Visual Arts and is a and courtesy Thomas
Europe during this period, a comparable figure in the United contributing editor of Art in America. Dane Gallery, London,
States might be Vito Acconci, as is suggested by Schor (who credits and Bildrecht, Vienna;
Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works © Estate of Ana Mendieta
him, along with Chris Burden, as having influence comparable from the Sammlung Verbund, Vienna, and courtesy Galerie Lelong,
to that of Beuys) and Krauss alike. For women taking on the mantle in addition to an extensive tour throughout New York
Europe, is on view at The Photographers’
of the avant-garde, as Schor defines the feminist art movement, Gallery, London, October 2016 until All photographs courtesy
usurping Beuys would have meant engaging with an enormously January 2017. Sammlung Verbund, Vienna

WORDS 47
AP E RTU RE 48
 TG Promo B, 1980.
Photograph by Szabo

COSEY FANNI
TUTTI
Alison M. Gingeras

“Sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted.” in films and live performances. Transgressing the conventions
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence of feminist body and performative art practices of the era,
from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, 1990 Fanni Tutti’s full assimilation in the world of sex work was
profoundly radical—well beyond the discursive posturing
Long before the flames of the feminist culture wars of the 1980s of many of her peers.
ignited over fractious issues such as pornography and the politics In 1976, Fanni Tutti officially “came out” as an artist on the
of erotic representation, Cosey Fanni Tutti navigated this thorny occasion of her exhibition Prostitution at London’s Institute of
landscape through her art practice. Perhaps better known in the Contemporary Arts (ICA). The hard-core spreads she had made
experimental music community as a cofounder of the ground- as a sex worker were proclaimed as her own artistic production—
breaking band Throbbing Gristle (active from 1973 to the early she dubbed them her “magazine actions” and stated on the
1980s), Fanni Tutti led a double life in the same period, working exhibition’s poster-cum-manifesto, “Cosey has appeared in 40
as a model and performer in the porn industry in the United magazines now as deliberate policy…. Different ways of seeing
Kingdom. Without framing her participation under the relatively and using Cosey with her consent, produced by people unaware
“safe cover” of her identity as an artist, Fanni Tutti was completely of her reasons, as a woman and an artist.” This declaration of
immersed in the sex business throughout most of the 1970s, authorship and affirmation of her agency forms the conceptual
posing in more than forty hard-core porn magazines, as well as crux of Fanni Tutti’s practice. As Fanni Tutti later explained

P I CTU RE S 49
Prostitution, 1976. in “Confessions,” an unpublished manuscript, “My express
Promotional poster
for exhibition and intention with the project was both to infiltrate the sex market
performances at the to create [and purchase] my own image … and to gain first
Institute of Contemporary
Arts, London
hand experience of being a genuine participant in the genre….
I couldn’t adopt the approach of a voyeuristic or analytic artist
viewing from the outside…. What was required was for me to
become ‘one of the girls.’” Her emergence into the art world
from the “sordid” confines of the sex industry was a succès de
scandale. Although the exhibition was ultimately censored by
the ICA, it generated a mountain of press and debate. At least
one hundred articles were published in the British media, and the
matter was taken up in Parliament. In response to the institution’s
censure, Fanni Tutti displayed clippings of the tabloid outrage,
with headlines such as the Daily Mirror’s “Porn-pop art show!
Distasteful and unartistic!” in place of her work.
Today, the bulk of Fanni Tutti’s work from this period consists
of framed editorial pages of her various “magazine actions”—
constituting one of the most extreme positions within feminist
art practice. Some of her other important critical contributions
to radical feminism take the form of model Z-cards—originally
business cards deployed as banal tools of her trade to drum up
photoshoots or stripping gigs—that have now become auratic
artworks that turn on its head the paradigm of the passive female
model in the service of the male artistic gaze. The numerical
reduction of the model’s statuesque “assets” (bust size, height)
on these cards has been transformed by Fanni Tutti into a
defiant portrait of an artist whose practice continues to push
the boundaries of political correctness and gender politics.
By claiming authorship of these objectifying promotional
cards, an essential element of her work, Fanni Tutti triumphantly
asserts the “dark powers” of her own body, as well as her sexual
agency as an artist. Fanni Tutti is no victim, she’s the antagonist-
protagonist—both author and subject of a narrative that subverts
mainstream feminist objections to pornography and sex work
as exploitative. Prefiguring the writings by Camille Paglia that
became the sex-positive lightning rod of feminist scholarship,
Fanni Tutti reminds us, as Paglia claims in Sexual Personae,
that “pornography cannot be separated from art; the two
interpenetrate each other, far more than humanistic criticism
has admitted.”
Fanni Tutti’s work as a visual artist continues to be
underrecognized, despite her foreshadowing of so many issues
central to feminism and the politics of representation. With
hard-core pornography just a simple click away, and with the
advent of serious academic scholarship devoted to pornography,
such as Linda Williams’s edited volume Porn Studies (2004), it
does seem perplexing that it is the explicit nature of Fanni Tutti’s
oeuvre that causes her to be marginalized within the growing
canon of feminist art history. This “dark power” of Fanni Tutti’s
work—its insistence on radical agency—has prevented it from
being neutralized and absorbed into the mainstream. As such,
Fanni Tutti remains an icon of the political necessity for women
to engage in erotic representation, sexual empowerment,
and the usefulness of pornography to disturb normative attitudes
toward gender roles and repressive sexual mores.

Alison M. Gingeras is a curator and writer

based in New York and Warsaw.

AP E RTU RE 5 0
 Camera Standing Pose,
Szabo Sessions, Volume I
(detail), 2010

P I CTURE S 5 1
Left:
Feeling Cosey?, 1976.
Magazine action in Fiesta
10, no. 7, 1976

Right:
Single-Sided B/W Model Z
Card, 1977

AP E RTU RE 5 2
 Double-Sided B/W Model Z
Card, 1975
All photographs courtesy the
artist and Cabinet Gallery,
London

P I CTU RE S 5 3
 Sex
Wars
Revisited
Laura Guy

“For years we as lesbian-feminists have been fighting male

pornography,” a reader named Donna from Washington, D.C.,
wrote. “It shocks and abhors me to find that women have stooped to
the same methods.” To scan the letters pages of the San Francisco–
based magazine On Our Backs, published from 1984 to 2005,
is to find lesbian erotica thrown into relief against the backdrop
of the feminist sex wars. Antagonisms that characterized the
movement in the 1980s play out in an epistolary exchange, and
through the rancor, a contrasting story emerges. “How different—
bold—and wonderful to see (for my first time) women enjoying
women,” another reader commented. “It makes me remember
that I’m not alone in my thoughts, although fairly secluded in
South Carolina,” says another. One reader gets right to the point:
“A splendid aid to masturbation! Thanks!” Nestled among these
letters are whetted appetites and desires unmet, a request for
clarification on attraction between butches, a note about racial
integration in the San Francisco leather scene, even a complaint
about proofreading errors. A field of lesbian desire appears,
one that was contested, shared, and shaped by contributors and
readers alike.
The publication emerged at a juncture in feminist history
known as the sex wars, a time of high-octane tensions between
“pro-sex” and “anti-pornography” feminists. The two terms
obscure the complexity of these debates yet gesture toward a
stark ideological rift. To summarize, pro-sex feminists sought new
languages for female desire. Feminist anti-pornography groups,
Leon Mostovoy, from such as Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media and
the series Market Street
Cinema, 1987–88
Women Against Pornography, campaigned for increased legal
© the artist sanctions on the production and circulation of pornographic

AP E RTU RE 5 4
Left: material. Photography figured predominantly in this debate, both
Shari Cohen,
cover of On Our Backs, as a catalyst for antagonism and a means by which feminist affinities
January–February 1989 might be established and fantasies explored. In the context of
Right:
Kelly Dylan, cover of
these fraught and painful divisions, On Our Backs contributed
On Our Backs, May–June to a burgeoning media through which images of lesbian sexuality
1989 were constructed and disseminated, lusted after and spurned.
Courtesy the Lesbian
Herstory Archives The magazine was an early platform for lesbian sex photography.
Along with the Boston-based Bad Attitude, it carved out a space
for others to emerge (Outrageous Women, Wicked Women, Quim,
and Lezzie Smut, to name a few international examples that
followed). In its first decade, On Our Backs was instrumental
in shaping a culture organized around lesbian desire. The first
editorial, written by Debi Sundahl and Myrna Elana, cofounding
editor and publisher, respectively, introduces On Our Backs as
an “offering” to the community with the aim of “sexual freedom,
respect and empowerment for lesbians.” There were many who
worked to realize this goal. Susie Bright, then the manager of
Good Vibrations, a San Francisco shop selling sex toys for women,
oversaw six years as editor in chief. Starting out as something
of a sexual agony aunt, she wrote an advice column that became
a trademark of the magazine. Nan Kinney, another founding editor,
went to develop Fatale Media, a producer of lesbian erotica videos
that by the end of the 1980s was the largest of its kind. Alongside
essays, poetry, and graphic art, photography was key to realizing
the ambitions of the magazine, and On Our Backs was shaped
around a culture of image makers. Its smart black-and-white
aesthetic was defined by photographers such as Honey Lee Cottrell,
Tee Corinne, Morgan Grenwald, Jill Posener, Leon Mostovoy, and
Katie Niles. Photography stories, reportage, constructed scenes,
and advertising images mixed with informative articles, erotic
fiction, and, importantly, personals. Later, people like Lulu Belliveau
and Phyllis Christopher would be instrumental in developing an ever
more stylish visual language that continued to challenge the paucity
of available images of lesbians in mainstream culture.

AP E RTU RE 5 6
Left: There are perhaps two intertwined genealogies here. One is
Connie Whitaker, cover of
On Our Backs, Winter 1987 within histories of feminism, the other within those of homosexual
Right: culture. As often happens in politics, the sex wars played out
Bertie Ramirez, cover
of On Our Backs,
as a dispute not only between opposing factions but also different
Summer 1987 generations. This division caricatured second-wave lesbian
Courtesy the Lesbian
feminism as desexualizing lesbian identity in favor of a political
Herstory Archives
definition (“Any woman can be a lesbian,” sang lesbian separatist
folk musician Alix Dobkin in 1974). Riffing on the politics of
the 1970s, if not antagonistically, then at least with irreverence,
On Our Backs appropriated their title from off our backs, a well-
known feminist newspaper with roots in the women’s liberation
movement. A series of images that Christopher produced for
On Our Backs in 1992 announced a fetish for flannel. Christopher
Alongside essays, poetry, admits—with, one suspects, tongue firmly in cheek—to having
suppressed her desire for the unfashionable check until seeing
and graphic art, photography a documentary about Olivia Records, a record label synonymous
was key to realizing the ambitions with 1970s lesbian feminism. Getting off on history indicates
a less complete break with the past than the idea of feminist waves
of the magazine. first implied.
On Our Backs also looked back to public sex cultures that
emerged in the wake of gay liberation. Many photographers whose
work appeared in the magazine subverted the visual language of
the male-dominated BDSM community. Grenwald’s fetish pictures,
including a piece of lace reminiscent of a handkerchief or panties
folded into a back pocket, offer a wry counterpoint to Hal Fischer’s
record of homosexual dress codes collected in his book Gay Semiotics
(1977). Christopher acknowledges the formal influence of Robert
Mapplethorpe on her approach to visualizing lesbian sex and desire.
But, however exciting it might be to consider this subversion of
gay male culture, references to canonical figures like Mapplethorpe
should not obscure the radical project pursued by Christopher,
Grenwald, and their colleagues. As the AIDS crisis took hold in the
United States and elsewhere, the imperative to create publicly visible
representations of queer sex became ever more vital. In the context

WORDS 5 7
Right: Opposite:
Tessa Boffin, The Angel, Del LaGrace Volcano,
1990, from the series On the Way There,
The Knight’s Move London, 1988
© Estate of Tessa Boffin/ © the artist
Gupta+Singh Archives

Below:
Phyllis Christopher,
Alley South of Market,
San Francisco, 1997
Courtesy the artist

AP E RTURE 5 8
of political disempowerment and medical crisis, lesbian sex AIDS crisis intersected with pernicious gentrification in
photography would take on increasing political charge, as the San Francisco, which had a homogenizing effect on the city.
magazine provided an essential platform for lesbian creativity Revisiting this era through the pages of the magazine allows
during a regime of state censorship enacted during the period a different set of possibilities relating to queer identity to emerge.
of the culture wars in the United States. Circulating in unmarked On Our Backs is but one chapter in a rich history that also includes
envelopes, On Our Backs networked lesbians internationally. the work of Cathy Cade, Ruth Mountaingrove, Corinne, and
An exchange took place between photographers in the U.S. and Volcano, whose vital contributions to queer photography began
the U.K., where figures like Del LaGrace Volcano, Tessa Boffin, in the lesbian bars of San Francisco in the early 1980s. Trans or
and Jean Fraser foregrounded lesbian identity within the theories intersex-identified photographers like Volcano and Mostovoy
of representation emerging out of schools such as the Polytechnic started in the dyke scene alongside writers like Patrick Califia,
of Central London. If this was photography in the service of pleasure, known for his groundbreaking writing on BDSM subcultures
it was also photography in the service of history. To engage in and trans politics. Held within lesbian sex cultures of the 1980s
documenting lesbian sex in the 1980s was to advance the historically are the kernels of the ongoing struggles for recognition—of trans
necessary claims of feminism and gay liberation into the public folk, sex workers, fat activists—that continue to unsettle feminism
sphere. For example, Mostovoy’s images of lesbian sex workers today. At times it seems the magazine presents us with a lesbian
at San Francisco’s Market Street Cinema might be viewed as part feminist history of queer photography; at others, a queer history
of a broader reworking of documentary practice in the 1980s, tied of lesbian feminist photography. Perhaps instead, the diverse
to the emergent debates around the politics of representation. Yet record of lesbian desire produced through the photographs in
many lesbian practitioners regarded documentary with suspicion. On Our Backs shows us that the two are yoked together, far harder
Instead, pornography, which is peculiarly structured by both arch to separate than existing histories might have us believe.
realism and pure fantasy, provided a space where the pathologization
of lesbian sexuality could be resisted. For its ubiquity, its obscenity,
perhaps even the material conditions of its production, pornography
is a particularly degraded kind of image making in histories of
photography, removed from the value systems of the academy
as well as those of the art world.
A collective project like a magazine is bound to be fraught
with internal struggles, and from the outset On Our Backs lived
with a degree of financial precarity that would lead to both a
hiatus and change in management in the mid-1990s. The difficulty
Laura Guy is a writer based in Glasgow,
of running the publication was compounded by the mounting U.K., where she is Lecturer in Art Context
restrictions on queer spaces as moral hysteria surrounding the and Theory at the Glasgow School of Art.

WORDS 5 9
 As a young woman, the conceptual artist Gillian Wearing posed
and vamped in photo booths. In the footsteps of Andy Warhol
and the rest of the world, she subsequently transitioned
to Polaroids. Like today’s selfies, Wearing’s Polaroids often
capture her outstretched arm in the act of triggering the shot.
Her long-term series My Polaroid Years consists of instant
self-portraits dating from 1988 to 2005—from age twenty-four,
shortly after Wearing entered the graduate art program at
Goldsmiths College in London, until forty-two, in the midst
of producing her seminal self-portrait series Album (2003–6).
The Polaroids reproduced here for the first time are selected
from almost 150 that were recently exhibited by her New York
gallery in a wooden vitrine, like museum artifacts, thus indicating
their relationship to her career-long fascination with self-
documentation.
In roughly chronological order, a pageant of images reveals
the artist’s experiments with wigs and hairstyles, makeup,
lighting, and pose. The images recall the Polaroid’s professional
use as a test medium for more expensive color film. But when
Wearing made these shots she had no other project in mind. She
used the Polaroid camera as an existential recording device—
to fix her self-reflection or to try out a new look. Consequently,
the domestic settings of the pictures seem insignificant in
comparison to the artist’s visage, which is often rendered
luminous and masklike by a blast of flash reflected off pancake
makeup.
Wearing pairs these eighteen Polaroids with a previously
unpublished self-portrait from 1991 entitled Me:Me, which

Gillian
literalizes self-reflection through its mirror image and collapses
the male/female binary into a multiple representation of self,
a move that seems to herald the series Me as … (2008–13),
where she recreates iconic photographic portraits of members

Wearing
of her “spiritual family”—artists like Warhol and Robert
Mapplethorpe—in the process suggesting that identity is not
only transtemporal but also transgender. This theme extends
to Me as Cahun Holding a Mask of My Face (2012), pictured
on the cover of this issue, in which Wearing inhabits the
guise of Claude Cahun, the lesbian Surrealist writer and artist.
Rediscovered in the 1990s, Cahun was known for her gender-
bending, theatrical self-portraits. Wearing, like Cahun,
Jennifer Blessing conceives of gender as multivalent.
Across these private instant prints, Wearing seems to be
wrestling with the public masquerade of femininity, documenting
a conversation with herself. The photographs reproduced
here date from the first ten years of My Polaroid Years. The last
image presented was shot several months after she catapulted
to fame as the winner of the Turner Prize in 1997. Wearing stopped
taking Polaroids at the moment when digital was replacing
analog, and yet she remained faithful to the indexical mark by
creating real masks to wear. In 2000, she made her first bona fide
self-portrait, in which she wore a rudimentary mask of her own
face with only her eyes exposed: a portrait of the artist playing
the role of herself.

Opposite: Me:Me, 1991

Overleaf: My Polaroid
Years, 1988–2005
© the artist and courtesy
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery,
Jennifer Blessing is Senior Curator, New York; Maureen Paley,
Photography, at the Solomon R. London; and Regen Projects,
Guggenheim Museum in New York. Los Angeles

AP E RTURE 6 0
AP E RTURE 6 2
P I CTU RE S 6 3
RENÉE
COX
A TASTE
OF
POWER
A Conversation with Uri McMillan

Renée Cox knows a thing or two about style. A former fashion model for Glamour
and photographer for Essence, Cox had an early career in New York defined by
the rapid pace of commercial assignments. In her thirties, turning to fine art
photography, she began the first of several self-portrait series, portraying a
multitude of stylized, powerful, and iconoclastic black women. These avatars—
historic characters, fierce mothers, cosmopolitan socialites, and Afro-centric
superheroes—are imbued with sexual agency and resolute confidence. Cutting
a distinctive path in contemporary photography, Cox’s icons narrate a field
of vision where black women perform for the world on their own terms.
Running in parallel to Cox’s photography is the evolving image of black
women in popular American media and culture, including such icons as Angela
Davis, Grace Jones, and Beyoncé. But the widespread consumption of images
can erase a subject’s political message. In her classic 1994 essay “Afro Images,”
Davis, a distinguished philosopher and activist, recalls that it was “both
humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events
that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.”
Just as Davis sought to retake her own identity, Cox, in her photography,
reimagines the lives of black women as central to debates about equality and
respect. Here, Cox speaks with Uri McMillan about racial icons, stylish images,
and the pursuit of power.
AP E RTURE 6 4
Uri McMillan: Let’s begin with your journey from working in RC: For me, the icon comes from within; it’s very organic. It’s
the milieu of fashion photography in New York and Paris for a reaction. I refuse to be put down, squashed, or made invisible.
magazines like Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and Vogue Hommes I’m here, seven feet tall, larger than life. The thing that I use is the
to switching exclusively, in the 1990s, to fine art photography gaze. Ninety percent of the time, I’m looking back at the viewer
after the birth of your first son. looking at me. It’s about creating freedom. I’m not one of these
black artists who’s trying to run away from blackness. There is no
Renée Cox: I had an interest in photography from the day in high postblack. There’s no post; it’s only the present.
school when they made a mistake and put me in the advanced class.
I was supposed to be with the beginners because I’d never done UM: In regard to the black-power era of the late 1960s and
it before. So, I learned the practice of being in the darkroom and early ’70s, no one’s image has been circulated as much as that
shooting right away. It was kind of nice, that moment when you’re of Angela Davis. She is perceived as the embodiment of an era,
young and you realize, Oh! That’s what my talent is. or in her words, “a nostalgic surrogate for historical memory.”
Yet, she has been very critical of the way her image travels. In
UM: What was your first job? her 1994 essay “Afro Images,” she discusses her alarm at the
way indelible images of herself, such as the FBI’s notorious
RC: At Fiorucci, at the time a very trendy store on Fifty-Eighth 1971 wanted poster, or photographs of her speaking to crowds
Street in New York. I also did a little bit of modeling. My biggest of protesters, were later decontextualized and dehistoricized.
modeling job was for Glamour in the early 1980s, posing as the girl
who just graduated from college and was looking for a job in New RC: She became an icon—for her hair.
York City—that was me. Brigitte Lacombe shot it. During the
course of the four-day shoot, the fashion editor—Phyllis Posnick, UM: Right. She was reduced to her now stylish Afro,
now at Vogue—asked me if I had ever considered working at a transforming a “politics of liberation to a politics of fashion.”
fashion magazine. Previously, I had met with Deborah Turbeville, What are your thoughts on Angela Davis as the prototypical
who gave me the blueprint. So, I didn’t have to think twice; black feminist icon?
I immediately jumped on it.
I did fashion for ten years. During that period, I shot a RC: At the time, she was doing something very revolutionary,
lot for Essence. If you look back at Essence in the 1980s, when it but it becomes flattened when you only get the superficial sound
looked cool, that was usually me shooting. As a result, Spike Lee bites about the Panthers that appeal to ignorant people. This
summoned me to shoot his poster for School Daze (1988) and some flattening has happened with my work as well. The Rajé series,
album covers—Gang Starr and the Jungle Brothers, for instance. for instance, had a lot of meaning and depth behind every one
I had a good little thing going. But then I got to the ten-year mark, of those images. Yet, people would say to me, “How often do you
had my first kid, and hit thirty. I was doing a lot of editorial then, work out?” What do you mean, how often do I work out? This
and that work only had a twenty-eight-day life span. After that it is not a Jane Fonda workout video! If you’re a fit black woman,
was done. there’s this whole exotic longing for the other.

UM: There’s no longevity to it, no permanence to the work. UM: Grace Jones, on the other hand, is an icon of a much
different order, understood as sine qua non to the 1970s
RC: Zero. I mean, maybe if you do the book, twenty years out. downtown party network. Similarly exoticized for her
But that’s about it. I started thinking to myself, I can be an artist, sleek athleticism, she’s a striking counterpart to your
too. I have things to say. Then I quickly realized I needed to own work, particularly her distinct dynamism as a visual
go to grad school for anybody to take me seriously. I left the fashion subject. You also have amazingly similar geographic
industry for the School of Visual Arts, and then on to the Whitney trajectories—Jamaica, Syracuse, Paris, and New York City.
Independent Study Program, arriving in this intellectual land
where people spoke in tongues. The program started in September. RC: We definitely had a lot in common, for sure. She obviously had
By October, I knew I was pregnant. I came in and said, “I’m a lot of insight in how she wanted to be portrayed. Yet, I can’t negate
pregnant—with my second child.” People looked at me like, the fact that she collaborated with Jean-Paul Goude. He’s the one
“Oh my God, are you sure? What are you going to do?” I was who can present the idea of using her in Peugeot advertisements
outraged. I had been through grad school and was not cutting my and the company says, “Whoo, yeah!”
career off; I was just getting started. That’s how the series Yo Mama
(1992–94) came about. I decided I’m going to give you pregnancy UM: Finally, perhaps inevitably, we come to Beyoncé. To
in your face—and that’s what I did. In other societies, women consider Beyoncé as a feminist icon is a bit ironic, since she
have allowed the males to dominate. I was like, No. Women are initially expressed ambivalence to the term feminist and
fucking strong. You make somebody in forty weeks; that’s pretty to her songs, such as “Bootylicious,” being labeled feminist
phenomenal. That’s the power of a woman. anthems. She has now apparently embraced the term—she
showed off an enormous light-up sign reading FEMINIST
UM: Let’s talk about icons and iconography. A large part at a 2014 concert—and also through specific angles, such
of your practice has been the creation of new and affirming as sampling Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s
self-representations for black diasporic peoples, as a visual 2013 TED Talk “We should all be feminists.” I am curious
corrective to both art history and history writ large. And as to your thoughts on her, particularly since she has become
this has often taken the form of larger-than-life iconoclastic the black female icon.
black female heroines, such as Rajé in your series Rajé
(1996–98), as well as portrayals of self-possessed erotic RC: Before speaking with you, I said to my assistant, “Let me try to
subjects. Who are your icons? What makes a powerful image? be politically correct here. I don’t want the ‘Bey-hive’ coming after
What are the complications in transforming black women me.” She’s talented and has a good team around her to make her
into icons? look good. I give her that. But … [laughs].

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Photographer unknown, Andy Warhol,
Political activist Angela Grace Jones, 1984
Davis at press conference, © The Andy Warhol
September 23, 1969 Foundation for the Visual
© Bettmann/Getty Images Arts, Inc./Artists Rights
Society, New York, and
Right: courtesy the J. Paul Getty
Ezra Shaw, Beyoncé Museum, Los Angeles
performs during the Pepsi
Super Bowl 50 Halftime
Show, Santa Clara, CA,
February 7, 2016
© the artist/Getty Images

Page 65:
Chillin’ with Liberty, 1998,
from the series Rajé

WORDS 67
Hott-en-tot, ca. 1993–94

UM: Visually, her very clear recycling of black-power sartorial white women who lived in the suburbs, and in some ways they
aesthetics, in her performance of “Formation” for the 2016 killed it for themselves. Men have been treating women badly
Super Bowl, circles us back to Angela Davis. In my opinion, for centuries. So continue with the chivalry.
it was a bit problematic.
UM: What resurfaces in Beyoncé are the manifold historical
RC: Yes, because it’s not coming from any real place. I didn’t hear tensions between white and black feminisms, academic
her say “Stop killing black young men” and see her put her fists and mass feminisms, and the presence of unruly black
up in the air. No, she didn’t do that. I’m sorry, but to me that was female bodies in the visual sphere. In your own work, you’ve
pure nothingness. How did that performance represent the Black often brought history to the stage. Take Saartjie “Sarah”
Panthers? The Black Panthers were trying to get breakfast for kids Baartman, also known as the Hottentot Venus, a Khoikhoi
and trying to protect their communities, before they were destroyed woman who was born in South Africa in the late eighteenth
by Hoover and the FBI. You’re just talking about the sensational century and later paraded around Europe as a form of
part of the Panthers: the guns, the black leather jacket, and the public entertainment. Her story is ground zero for the
black beret. grisly objectification of the black female body, as well as
its visual coding as grotesque, fleshy excess, dark fantasy,
UM: So her “feminism” is just on the surface? and pathology. Which makes it all the more remarkable
that your restaging of this history—and body—in Hott-en-tot
RC: “I’m a feminist.” “Put a ring on it.” Oh, okay, great. Come on! (ca. 1993–94) is playful while revealing the hyperbole
I don’t even call myself a feminist. I just believe that women should and stereotypes embedded in these erotic fantasies.
have the same rights as men, and be treated and paid accordingly. By deconstructing the black female body, you reveal the
Simple. I hate to say it, but the whole feminist movement was for indelible, sticky myths behind it.

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RC: I was horrified when I first read about her and found out she was Baby Back, 2001,
from the series American
taken to Europe and toured around like a specimen, as if to justify Family
colonization. I’m certainly not ashamed of her; that’s how some
of our people look.

UM: How did you make this image?

RC: It came together in a costume store. I saw the big tits and the
big ass in plastic! And I said, “Aha, there it is,” and took it back to
my studio, and shot it. That’s Hott-en-tot. That’s how it came about.

UM: Nobody would ever think about tracing that costume

back to a figure like the Hottentot Venus. I don’t know how
many times I’ve seen a random white teenager wear those
body parts during Halloween, and not think anything about
it being controversial or offensive.
I don’t even call myself a feminist.
RC: Well, that’s the lack of awareness. They don’t know the story
of the Hottentot Venus. They don’t know what their European
I just believe that women should
brethren and sistren were doing back then, how they were have the same rights as men.
exploiting people.

UM: I taught Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus (1996) this past

spring; literally none of my students had ever heard of the
Hottentot Venus. I did have one black female student who
was really moved by it. She said to me, “Thank you so much
for teaching this and for making me realize I’m not a freak.”
I was stunned.

RC: I would have been, like, “Girl, why did you think you were
a freak anyway? Who told you you’re a freak, and why did you
believe them?” But, that’s how the woman was built. End
of story.

WORDS 6 9
Miss Thang, 2009, UM: The spectacle isn’t about her. It’s actually about the
from the series
The Discreet Charm people who made her into one.
of the Bougies
RC: Exactly. That was the thing that I liked about Haile Gerima’s
Sankofa (1993) and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013).
I heard people say, “Why are we doing another slavery movie?”
Because some of us were slaves, and were treated very badly—
that’s why. You know, I went to this plantation down in South
Carolina, Magnolia. You’ve got to drive a mile before you get to
the big house and the vegetation is so dense, you can’t even see
your hand in front of you if you held it out. I’m saying to my son
that these people had to cut this down and level it. A mile’s worth
of land; flat as a golf course now. Then, we get up to the big house,
Throughout this series, you see and they wanted thirty dollars from me to go on a tour. I was
Missy going from living in this like, “Are you kidding?” They had not seen the likes of me before.
You have white people walking around with their baby strollers,
depressive, unconscious state saying, “The gardens are so lovely.” Yet, for me, this is like
to becoming enlightened and Auschwitz or Dachau; it’s a death camp. I went off. I said, “When
you see a black person coming up the drive, you need to roll out the
realizing she can live a life of joy. red carpet. You need to have people outside going, ‘We’re so sorry
that our ancestors were so degenerate and did the thing that they
did.’” That’s really what needs to be happening, not asking me for
thirty dollars to go on some damn tour.

UM: In that spirit, you transform dispossession into self-

possession. Baby Back (2001) continues such work, staging
the reclining black female nude—a contested object in its
own right, since the female nude is usually associated with
the white female body. You use black portraiture as a counter-
narrative to upend Manet’s Olympia (1863). Black women
move from the margins of the frame to the center. Yet,
even here, there is a subversive edge—the fire-engine-red

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Missy at Home, 2009,
from the series
The Discreet Charm
of the Bougies
All photographs by Renée
Cox courtesy the artist

patent-leather high heels, and the black leather whip, which UM: In Lady of the Night, Missy is reincarnated as an eroticized
references BDSM subcultures as it also alludes to histories version of herself, seemingly liberated from her pristine
of enslavement. surroundings and conservative attire. Missy’s attainment
of power is linked to gaining sexual power, as well.
RC: Exactly. If anybody’s going to be using the whip, it’s going
to be me. It’s not going to be used on me. I’ll be using it. Okay? RC: Right. In The Jump Off, she’s in bed with a guy, with the pills
[laughs] and the rum—because she’s Jamaican—but she also has a book
about Maroon society. Yet, she’s caught up in a lifestyle, and at
UM: And the shoes? that juncture of the series, she doesn’t yet know how to get out.
Her transition occurs when she’s traveling over in Asia, in Bali,
RC: Well, they’re sexy. and Cambodia, and the wig that she’s been wearing the whole
time is gone.
UM: In your series The Discreet Charm of the Bougies (2005–
ongoing), there is a provocative metatextuality happening. UM: You said you don’t call yourself a feminist, but power,
You stage yourself as the paradigmatic black housewife, a and specifically the power women generate for themselves,
woman of stature, class, and status—signaled by the pearls, has been one of your enduring themes. How have your
poodle, and especially the nameless white female servant. ideas about power evolved since you first began taking
Yet, that is partly undercut by the haunting of that character photographs?
by the huge photograph she owns: Yo Mama, your own
picture, featuring you as a nude mother clad in nothing RC: Once you have the power, you always have the power.
but black high heels, holding your son. What were your The power comes from within. It’s not a state of mind: the real
motivations for this series? power comes from the heart. All women have it. It’s a matter
of cultivating—and realizing—that power. You have to feel it.
RC: The Discreet Charm of the Bougies is a psychodrama. The star’s
name is Missy. She lives a very privileged life. She is very much
self-aware, but she is very much alone. She’s got a white maid,
but she’s blasé about it. It’s expected, in a way. Throughout this
series, you see her going from living in this depressive, unconscious
state to becoming enlightened and realizing she can live a life of joy. Uri McMillan is Associate Professor of
Obviously, it’s my own personal journey. Because for me, one of Performance Studies at UCLA and the
author of Embodied Avatars: Genealogies
the key things was when I realized I didn’t need anybody to validate of Black Feminist Art and Performance
me except myself. (2015).

WORDS 7 1
 In the early to mid-1990s, a handful of young women elbowed
their way into Japan’s traditional photography world, which
was dominated almost exclusively by established male masters
and their acolytes. Young phenoms like Yurie Nagashima won
critical acclaim with photographs that often turned the camera
on themselves, their lives, their loves, and their immediate
surroundings. This group of young women photographers
became known as onnanoko shashin, a term frequently translated
as “Girly Photo.” Their work was not only celebrated by the
art establishment, but also featured in lifestyle and fashion
magazines, becoming a force in pop culture at a time when
the socioeconomic and cultural status of Japanese women was
shifting. Nonetheless, many of these artists who sought to break
new ground found themselves bluntly confronted by traditional
gender expectations—as when established male photographer
Yasumasa Morimura dismissed them for being too casual,
of simply using their cameras “like toys.”
Nagashima stands out not only for having imbued her work
with a Riot Grrrl ethos, but for willfully cultivating an oppositional
stance to critiques such as Morimura’s—proffering a middle
finger to the stereotypes that continued to dictate the roles of
women, both as subjects and makers of photography. During the
1990s, the female nude was a frequent topic of debate in Japanese
photography, partially in direct response to overt government
censorship, which forbade the publication of explicit nudes and
the depiction of genitalia and pubic hair. Male photographers
like Nobuyoshi Araki and Kishin Shinoyama strove to test the

Yurie
limits of what could be published. Shinoyama, in particular,
became pivotal to the trend of creating what was coined “hair
nudes”—photographs and photobooks that dared to hint at,
if not actually depict, the presence of pubic hair on the female
body. Though such photographers presented themselves

Nagashima as radical, daring, and chic, what they produced was highly
profitable, and mainstream, soft-core porn masquerading as
fine art and freedom of expression.
“The master-servant relationship between photographers
and models in Japan in the ’90s reflected the power relations
between men and women generally,” Nagashima notes. “As a
Lesley A. Martin form of opposition, I wanted to create photos that might look like
art but that actually contest the dynamics of how the female body
is used.” Instead of nubile, wannabe actresses for hire, Nagashima
photographed herself, often directly locking eyes with the lens of
the camera in a confrontational stare. Her self-portraits satirize a
number of sexual fetishes prevalent in the hair-nude photographic
genre, and also in mainstream Japanese art, manga, and the
wildly popular role-play and fantasy sex clubs of the day. In her
earliest work, Nagashima takes on quite a few of these personas:
uniformed schoolgirl, wounded cutie in bandages, pink-haired
sex bomb, bondage babe. In another series, she photographed
her entire family—mother, father, brother, and self—in the nude.
This self-aware subversion of expectation and desire is part and
parcel of Nagashima’s work and separates it from the more purely
diaristic output of her Girly Photo contemporaries.
Nagashima continues to deal with issues of female identity.
Her photography might be seen as a bridge between an earlier
generation of Japanese women photographers like Mao Ishikawa,
whose frank document of her life as a hostess in American GI
bars in Okinawa during the 1970s was criticized and censored
for its explicit depiction of the female body and sexuality,
and up-and-coming photographers like Mayumi Hosokura,
with her dreamy nudes of men and women inspired by a real-life
story of under-the-table prostitution. At the heart of each of these
Lesley A. Martin is Creative bodies of work are female photographers daring to confront
Director of the Aperture
Foundation and publisher
the societal representation of their own desires, their bodies,
of The PhotoBook Review. their selves.

AP E RTU RE 7 2
Top:
Self-portrait
(the problems of ‘B’),
2002

Bottom:
Self-Portrait, 1993

P I CTURE S 7 3
No Peeping, 1994

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McDonald’s on Center Street, Shibuya, 1994

P I CTU RE S 7 5
Self-Portrait, 1993

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Tank Girl, 1994
All photographs © the artist

P I CTURE S 7 7
Hannah
Starkey
Sara Knelman

In Hannah Starkey’s recent pictures, London’s East End

seems less made up of concrete and steel than conjured from
reflections, graphic projections, and the intensity of compressed
space and glowing color. The purposefully anonymous women
in them—silhouetted by a nightclub marquee, shaded by a shock
of pink hair—are integral to the visual world they inhabit. We
might see them as images among images, equally resonant of
the aspirations and expectations suggested by the city’s surfaces
around them, on billboards and hoarding, in shopwindows,
or even divined from the hinted-at lives of other city wanderers.
Starkey has been making singular, large-scale photographs
of women in public for over twenty years, since moving to
London from her native Belfast. She doesn’t make many pictures,
and there are often very long stretches of walking and watching
before a handful of new ones takes shape. Often hiring actors or
collaborating with friends or strangers, Starkey casts her subjects
as anonymous flâneuses, neither specific nor typological.
The anticlimactic blankness of their static postures—standing,
sitting, staring—and the familiar, transient spaces in which they
pause mark them as both actors in the pictures and agents in
the world. They might appear to us as posed icons of beauty and

AP E RTURE 7 8
 Untitled, April 2006, 2006

P I CTURE S 7 9
desire, but they are also self-aware individuals struggling into
formation against the environments—architectural, visual,
social—that project and reflect them.
Despite their sharp stillness, Starkey’s images are incredibly
dynamic. Though they’ve often been described as cinematic,
their charge comes from the possibilities and surprises only a
still image can yield, from the pleasures and challenges of looking
carefully at an arrested moment. (To allow your eye to wander
freely and completely, her images are best seen at their intended
scale, usually around 4 by 5 feet.) In one of Starkey’s earliest
photographs, a young woman sits in a café, her hand held up
to an oblong mirror. She appears to be admiring her own pretty
reflection, but a closer look reveals a moth pinned delicately
beneath her fingers. Reflected in the mirror, an older woman
in red curlers watches with a faint but unmistakable frown.
A more recent image refracts elements from a mosaic of mirrors:
architecture, trees, graffiti, pavement, a young woman taking
a selfie—and the photographer herself, there with her camera
poised. Whatever sleights of hand might be at play—the trick
of the angled mirrors, the camera’s perspective, or digital
manipulation after the fact—the pieces, again, don’t quite add
up. What are we to make of all these apparent signs and symbols?
Are they haphazard, coincidental? Do they relate a story,
or foretell a future? Or are they performances of seduction?
For all of Starkey’s suspicion of the negative effects of mass-
media imagery, particularly of and on women, there’s a joyfulness
and an affection for looking and seeing in her pictures. In this
spirit, we might detect autobiographical resonances, glints of
a shifting mind and eye across the slow accumulation of pictures.
This is especially palpable in the more recent work, which
thrives on the loose, vibrant mood of the street. There’s a great
freedom, after all, a special pleasure of escape in the act of being
in public, of watching and being watched. In 1930 Virginia Woolf
made up the excuse of buying a pencil as a way of enjoying a
solitary walk across London, recounted in her vivid essay “Street
Haunting”: “As we step out of the house on a fine evening between
four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become
part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose
society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.”
She returns home with a pencil and the intense emotional
energy of other people it might, with great effort and a bit of
luck, recollect, reconfigure, and record.

Sara Knelman is a writer, curator,

and lecturer living in Toronto.

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 Untitled, May 1997, 1997

P I CTURE S 8 1
Mirror – Untitled, September 2015, 2015

AP E RTU RE 8 2
 Shadows – Untitled, October 2015, 2015

P I CTURE S 8 3
Untitled, January 2013, 2013

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 Untitled, November 2015, 2015

P I CTURE S 8 5
Untitled, January 2001, 2001
All photographs © the artist
and courtesy Maureen Paley,
London, and Tanya Bonakdar
Gallery, New York

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P I CTU RE S 87
 Martha Rosler, The Gray
Drape, 2008, from the
series House Beautiful:
Bringing the War Home,
New Series
© the artist and courtesy
Mitchell-Innes & Nash,
New York

History Is
Ours
Protest, revolt, and visual politics
Eva Díaz

For a woman living today, nostalgia strikes me as a WTF move. at various moments historically, then in the present, and again
I mean, helloooo ladies! Women are better off in the twenty- possibly in the future. But in offering an indexical, seemingly
first century than we ever were before. Many, but still not all evidentiary record of a prior event, photography straddles
of us, enjoy a host of rights and freedoms that were unavailable temporalities in a way that makes looking at a photograph an
even during our mothers’ youths. Pulling back a few generations encounter with the fleeting nature of time itself, as critics from
ago to first-wave feminist struggles, I know few women who long Siegfried Kracauer to Roland Barthes have noted. In documenting
for the days when we were treated as de jure minors: politically the history of feminism, photography both periodizes past struggles
disenfranchised, refused property rights and access to higher and highlights the radical claims made in the past that are still
education, our free movement in public space denied, our lives unattained.
largely circumscribed by domestic labor and child-rearing. The histories of feminism and photography are firmly
Rights for women to be treated as equal citizens have been intertwined; one could even argue that they are projects birthed
won over many centuries, a process requiring countless protests by modernity. The word feminism was coined by the utopian
and demands for recognition, and in struggles marred by frustration thinker Charles Fourier in 1837 (féminisme in the original French).
and defeat. Yet equality has not been accomplished. Parity in wages William Henry Fox Talbot took what is thought to be the first
and income between men and women has not been attained, and photographic image in 1834, a technique that he refined and
sexism and violence against women are still prevalent. Hell, studies patented as the calotype in 1841. Though photography may be
show that women are still doing more housework than men. slightly older than the word feminism, the popularization of the
Because feminist struggles continue, the task of historical study concept of equality for all women (not merely the noble) is credited
remains a crucial element in directing future efforts toward both to Mary Wollstonecraft, whose 1792 treatise A Vindication of the
equal opportunities and equal outcomes. In this goal, photography Rights of Woman drew on the successes of the American and
has played a key role. Much has been made about the temporal French revolutions to argue that universal education would foster
paradox of photography, the manner in which every photograph is a women’s equality.
document, a witness, even, of a past moment. Of course, an artwork In the twentieth century and into the present, a close
in any medium exists in multiple chronologies, having been painted, relationship between photography and feminist organizing
cast, carved, or whatnot at some time in the past and then viewed emerged. Three approaches predominate. First, photographic

WORDS 8 9
 documentation plays a central role in the work of women artists,
often as a strategy for recording performance practices in which
tropes of gender identity are explored and challenged—Claude
Cahun, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Valie Export, Adrian Piper,
Martha Wilson, and Cindy Sherman come to mind. Secondly,
appropriative practices, often those that critique the manner
in which gender roles are presented in mass media and advertising,
have been deployed by artists in photomontage practices
since the mid-1910s—think Hannah Höch and Martha Rosler.
Thirdly, the accumulative nature of photography has been explored
by artists to create archives proposing counterhistories that
include events neglected by dominant culture’s focus on the
accomplishments of men—the works of Mary Kelly and Sophie
Calle are prominent here.
If we consider the demands for equality on a spectrum
in which protest constitutes the most public and therefore most
self-publicizing aspect, then the means by which women have
used photography to document actions critical of patriarchy,
as well as to redeploy the codes of advertising’s publicity machine,
are numerous. Rosler’s series House Beautiful: Bringing the War
Home (ca. 1967–72), in which she juxtaposes images from girly
magazines and interior decorating layouts with those of Vietnam
War atrocities, has served as a catalyst for young artists in recent
years, particularly in making connections between the stereotyping
visual cultures of women’s magazines and pornography and the
violent imagery of foreign conflict. Revisiting the series in 2004 and
2008, Rosler paired fashion shots with images from the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars, making connections between objectification
and consumption, sexism and violence.
All art production is fraught with the problem of publicity as
the condition for bringing a work into public consciousness. Work
that advocates for social change bears a further pressure of speaking
to constituencies that may not define themselves as art audiences.
As cultural critic Chantal Mouffe has argued, while art can certainly
be political, it is hardly ever politics. The tension between the often
collective nature of protest and the sometimes singular authorship
behind a work produced for art venues is at the root of many of
the practices invested in feminist politics. Recent works by artists
Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, and Goshka Macuga move in a
space where these seeming contradictions become the enabling
conditions for a critique of male power that references the history
of feminist protest while simultaneously using tactics developed
by those self-same protests. Though the airing of grievances that
we call “protest” is burdened with problems of timeliness, historical
specificity, and obsolescence, these artists look to neglected
moments of the past because neglect is one of the means by which
Top:
Octavia Cephas in women have been obscured from artistic and political narratives.
Ricerche: three, 2013, In her works, Andrea Geyer has attempted to recover lost or
directed by Sharon Hayes
repressed stories of female creativity and authorship. An example
Bottom:
Jasmine Brown, Laakan is her 2004–8 projects on the model, actress, and writer Audrey
McHardy, Paola Lopez, Munson, who posed for many public monuments around New York
Anarkalee Perera, Zehra
Ali Khan, and Sara Amjad City in the 1910s. In Queen of the Artists’ Studios: The Story of Audrey
in Ricerche: three, 2013, Munson (2007), Geyer documents Munson’s appearances in public
directed by Sharon Hayes
sculptures for which she served as model and presents numerous
photographic and text works exploring the aftermath of Munson’s
abbreviated career, when she was institutionalized in an insane
asylum in upstate New York.
Geyer’s Insistence (2013), a fifteen-minute video, presents
a photographic archive the artist assembled when she began
conducting research on three women pivotal to the founding of the
Museum of Modern Art—Lillie P. Bliss, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller,
and Mary Quinn Sullivan—while weaving in images of other women
central to the history of modernism who have also been ignored.
The video uses a single camera pointed at a worn wooden tabletop.
As the video begins, Geyer’s hand is seen placing postcard-size

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Sharon Hayes, In the Near reproductions of photographic portraits of women, and reproductions
Future, Vienna (detail),
2006. Multiple-slide of artworks of and by women, upon the table, creating a pile
projection installation as the video progresses. Interspersed among these images are shots
Courtesy the artist and
Tanya Leighton Gallery,
of suffragists and scenes of “modern” women from early twentieth-
Berlin century illustrated magazines. In a spoken voice-over, Geyer tells
stories of women as arts patrons juxtaposed with considerations on
identity and history taken in part from a lecture by Gertrude Stein
called “Portraits and Repetition.” Some of Geyer’s subjects, such
as Frida Kahlo, Emma Goldman, Amelia Earhart, Isadora Duncan,
and Georgia O’Keeffe, may be familiar to viewers, whereas the
images of others trigger a curiosity to identify these intriguing
women. By the end of the video the teetering stack contains
approximately 350 photographs.
Geyer showed the work at the Museum of Modern Art in
2015 alongside a mural-sized, hand-drawn flow chart titled Revolt,
They Said (2012–ongoing). On the chart, Geyer attempts to map
the personal, professional, and political connections between
The collective nature of women like those she showed in Insistence, telescoping out from
protest becomes a gesture the women associated with MoMA’s founding moment in 1929
to connections between artists and political figures of the period.
of remembrance. With 850 women incorporated in the drawing, the work is a
monument to the central role of women in stories of aesthetic
transformation and political revolution. According to Geyer,
it is a “blueprint for how social change happens.”
Sharon Hayes has collaborated with Geyer on several projects,
including the 2010 exhibition History Is Ours, which showcased
recent feminist art projects. Hayes likewise emphasizes the archival
in her work, though she draws on the tradition of women performing
actions in public spaces as a challenge to gender norms, male power,
and the patriarchal monopoly on authorship. For Hayes’s series
In the Near Future (2009), she had herself photographed in public
spaces carrying placards from historical protests, such as one that
reads “I AM A MAN,” from the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’

WORDS 9 1
 Goshka Macuga,
Death of Marxism,
Women of All Lands
Unite, 2013. Installation
view at the New Museum,
New York, 2016
Photograph by Maris
Hutchinson/EPW Studio
© the artist and courtesy
the New Museum

strike, and another demanding “Ratify E.R.A. NOW!,” from Richerche: three (2013), a thirty-eight-minute video shown in
the failed struggle to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment in the 2013 Venice Biennale, addresses issues of feminism, community,
the late 1970s. Hayes’s photographs, depicting herself as a lone protest, and identity as they live in the microcosm of the college
picketer/protester adopting a pastiche of historical issues, bring up campus. Filmed with the participation of a group of thirty-five
discomfiting issues of artistic agency and political efficacy, as the students at Mount Holyoke College, a traditionally women’s college
collective and performative nature of protest becomes a gesture in western Massachusetts, Hayes’s work uncovers the fault lines
of remembrance. However, the sense of these issues’ asynchronous among a supposedly uniform population. In the work, Hayes asks
“pastness” only serves to empower the often unresolved demands a series of questions to the students, arranged in a line before the
of those prior protests. As Hayes notes, publicity means “making camera. Doing her best Phil Donahue impression, Hayes brings
something publicly appear,” and her work reinserts these seemingly her handheld mic close to each of her interlocutors as she asks
distant moments of leftist struggle back into contemporary them personal questions about sex, political participation,
consciousness and conscience. social justice, and the future of feminism. Increasingly, her subjects
Hayes’s work often balances on the knife-edge of political appear uncomfortable with each other’s answers. Tensions flare
solidarity and individual complaint. Her video piece In My Little in the last few minutes of the video when an argument between
Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You (2016) features several several students erupts. One student argues that feminist struggles
individuals filmed in their homes as they read letters to the editor have provided an umbrella for combating the victimization of
published in lesbian newsletters from the 1950s to the 1970s. The women and children, while another waves off feminism as a form
tone of the letters ranges from querulous to flirtatious, resigned to of cultural imperialism seeking to conform other cultures around
strident, a reminder of a period in which a community of feminist Western values.
lesbians was first coming into political self-consciousness and public Like New York–based artists Geyer and Hayes, Polish-born,
visibility, the same moment that that camaraderie was fracturing London-based Goshka Macuga emphasizes the performative
into various subgroups constituted by race, class, or butch/ and documentary qualities of photography in her work, while
femme identities. simultaneously drawing on the appropriative tradition of

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feminist photomontage. In recent works that were shown Gains in social equality can be precarious. In the face of
together at the New Museum in New York in 2016, Macuga creates conservative challenges to female empowerment, the high crests
photo collages from appropriated images she has then woven into of activism, organizing, and protest must be reflected upon in
wall-size fabric tapestries. In her work Death of Marxism, Women of order to prevent the rollback of hard-won victories. To make work
All Lands Unite (2013), Macuga uses photographs that the self-taught about these struggles means possessing a knowledge of history,
Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý surreptitiously took of women of the key figures and actions that have made demands for the
in his small village of Kyjov over several decades beginning in the gradual dismantling of patriarchy and male privilege. It helps
1960s. To produce his pictures Tichý employed clunky, homemade that these artists use the tools of protest not only to demand
cameras (which many thought were toys) to spy on women changing change, but also to reconstruct the world as other women might
at the local pool, for example, or merely to capture women walking want to live in it.
around on local streets.
Macuga combines life-size images of these women from
Tichý’s work into a grouping gathered around the monumental bust
of Karl Marx that adorns his grave. Rather than existing as subjects/
victims of Tichý’s somewhat creepy voyeurism, the women are
shown interacting with the grave site, one cleaning it with a broom,
others contemplating it. Riffing off Marx and Engels’s famous
slogan from The Communist Manifesto—“Workers of the world
unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains”—Macuga’s
substitution of women for workers throws into relief the sometimes
precarious role of women in progressive political struggles, tacitly
subsumed in the category of worker but historically excluded from
equal political participation.
In Death of Marxism, Women of All Lands Unite, the tapestry
unfurls from the wall onto the floor, occupying approximately ten
square feet of space in front of the wall. In this horizontal section
of the work Macuga appropriates parts of Tichý’s photographs
that depict a picnic on a bed of grass, with a book and a spray
of clothes scattered about. Upon this blanket of the tapestry a
pair of live female performers, dressed in flesh-colored unitards
embellished with sketchily drawn “nude” contours of their breasts
and limbs, lounge around reading books or acting as a continuation Andrea Geyer, still
of the audience of the women depicted in the wall-bound portion. from Insistence, 2013.
HD video, 15:21 minutes,
The imperative of the title becomes a depiction of a kind of radical color, sound
leisure instantiating the goal of a world beyond onerous work Courtesy the artist;
Galerie Thomas Zander,
and the extraction of surplus value from labor that Marx and Engels Eva Díaz is Associate Professor, History Cologne; and Parque
proposed. of Art and Design, at the Pratt Institute. Galería, Mexico City

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Katharina
Gaenssler the beholder thus shifts with the change in perspective of the
Yvonne Bialek photographer, becoming an exercise in comprehending the
construction of the whole. The images from Munich 13–22 March
2006 use a similar disguise. At first glance they might evoke the
notion of being a single photograph of shelves on a wall, filled
with books, videos, and magazine clippings, yet more intimate
examination reveals the artist’s carefully composed view. In fact,
they are both, but also more. Gaenssler’s approach—to render
visible the interior in a supposedly neutral documentation—
creates a multifaceted hyperimage.
As Gaenssler narrowed her focus onto specifics in the work,
the resident’s manically curated collection—displaying multiple
ways in which women, including movie icons, models, friends,
and even the artist herself, are shown by and in photography—is
recorded and unfolded again in interlayered pictures of pictures.
Her work assembles these differing perspectives into an archive
of views, which correlate with our own gaze. “For me,” as Gaenssler
noted in a 2007 interview, “it’s about the relationship between
things. About how closely seeing is knit with thinking. The eye
leaps from detail to detail, taking up a different image at each
The inhabitant of this one-bedroom Munich apartment treated individual moment, forging links of whatever kind, formal,
his living space as a display for the arrangement of a vast graphic or semantic. Every viewer fills the gaps with personal
collection. In his personal Wunderkammer, every shelf was memories and notions.”
stuffed with books and DVDs, every inch of wall space was
covered with images—cut-outs from magazines and newspapers
as well as personal photographs, but also matchboxes,
receipts, and other ephemera that all served to display a private
passion. The desire to possess pictures and the embrace of a
spectatorship that resists any hierarchy between the images
of celebrities or of friends form a vivid interior (in the double
sense of the word, being both a physical and imaginative mental
space) where mediated and personal experience seamlessly
intertwine. This private exhibition of a personal archive became
the subject of German artist Katharina Gaenssler’s work
Munich 13–22 March 2006 (2006), which she approached in
her characteristically comprehensive manner.
The investigation of the relation between bodies (subjects,
objects, and images) in space and photography is an ongoing
plot rehearsed in Gaenssler’s work. Starting with the production
of single, close-up photographs, she accumulates vast amounts
of shots, segments of a particular environment, then arranges
them into an elaborate grid. Her works often materialize into
extensive spatial installations. For her presentation of Munich
13–22 March 2006 at Barbara Gross Galerie in Munich, in 2006,
Gaenssler used 2,700 images she had taken of her friend’s
apartment. By pasting the images directly onto the wall,
the installation became a mosaic with a trompe l’oeil effect,
evoking the illusion of the reconstructed space, but which upon
close view revealed itself as simply an assemblage of pictures:
a collection recollected. All photographs from
Gaenssler has also applied this meticulous architectural Munich 13–22 March 2006,
2006
method to such settings as the artist Hanne Darboven’s studio Courtesy the artist; Barbara
and the Bauhaus school in Dessau. For the exhibition of these Gross Galerie, Munich;
Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv;
projects, the seams of single images remain visible, guiding the Yvonne Bialek is an art historian, lecturer, and with the permission
gently fractured view from one picture to the next. The focus of and curator based in Berlin. of Osinella

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 ON
Eva Respini

DEFIANCE
Experimentation as resistance

Sara VanDerBeek,
Concrete Forms, 2015
Courtesy the artist and
Metro Pictures, New York

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Below, left: Below, right: In 1971, Linda Nochlin famously asked in the title of an essential
Miranda Lichtenstein, Berenice Abbott, Water
Last Exit, 2013 waves change direction, essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Lamenting
Courtesy the artist 1958–61 the meager representation of women in art, she declared: “There are
© Berenice Abbott/
Getty Images
no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix
or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de
Kooning or Warhol.” In the heated debates of second-wave feminism,
these dialogues were crucial and vital, and were essential to
creating a more pluralistic narrative of art in the twentieth century.
But those conversations rarely included photography—or film, or
architecture, or design, for that matter—art forms that were other.
Photography is now our lingua franca—it is the dominant
medium of our image-saturated era. Over the last half century
photography has joined the ranks of painting and sculpture in the art
market and the museum (this May, for instance, the newly expanded
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art dedicated an unprecedented
15,500 square feet to photography). Recent years have also seen a
spate of women-only exhibitions, including the Centre Pompidou’s
2010 elles@centrepompidou featuring works from their collection,
the Musée d’Orsay’s Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers? 1839–1945
(2015–16), and Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women,
1947–2016 (2016) at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in Los Angeles.
Despite exhibitions to further the visibility of women artists,
many museums have fallen short of presenting balanced and diverse
programs. In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art came under fire
for its lack of female representation in its permanent galleries,
with critic Jerry Saltz tallying a pitiful 3.5 percent of the art on view
from their collection as being by women. But his numbers reflected
displays from the collections of painting and sculpture only, not
the collections of architecture and design, drawings and prints,
and photography, where there were more works by women on view
(although still not 50 percent). As a curator working at MoMA at the
time, I was acutely aware of the imbalance, but dismayed by Saltz’s
limited (and retrograde) view of art. In fact, MoMA was in the midst
of organizing Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography
(2010–11), an exhibition (of which I was a cocurator) that surveyed
the history of photography with some two hundred works by
women. This is all to say that even in the early twenty-first century,
photography is still other.

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 This century has witnessed a boom of women artists
investigating the possibilities of the photographic medium in new
and exciting ways. Artists such as Liz Deschenes, Sara VanDerBeek,
Eileen Quinlan, Miranda Lichtenstein, Erin Shirreff, Anne Collier,
Mariah Robertson, and Leslie Hewitt all defy the dominant idea
of a photograph as an observation of life, a window onto the world.
While each artist possesses her own aesthetic language and artistic
concerns, as a whole, their practices represent a look inward—
to the studio, still life, rephotography, material experimentation,
abstraction, and nonrepresentation. Driven by a profound
engagement with the medium, these artists have created a
dynamic domain for experimentation that has taken contemporary
photography by storm.
It’s certainly risky to create a binary of “traditional” photography,
which claims an indexical relationship to the world, versus the
avant-garde tradition that considers the properties of photography
itself: its circulation, production, and reproduction. As curator
Matthew S. Witkovsky notes, “Abstraction … is not photography’s
secret common denominator, nor is it the antidote to ‘traditional’
photography.” Recent scholarship has gone a long way to recuperate,
and problematize, the status of experimental photography within
photographic discourse. Nevertheless, throughout photography’s
history, the avant-garde tradition has been considered an
“alternate” to the dominant understanding of photography.
Can an argument be made that women have found fertile
ground in the underchampioned arena of nonconventional image
making? Have the historic marginalizations (of photography,
avant-garde experimentation, and women artists) contributed
to the vitality we see today? Can working against photographic
convention, in a medium that is still sometimes considered
other, be viewed as an act of defiance? It’s also challenging to
make an argument based on gender (or race, sexuality, geography),
since men have undoubtedly made accomplished work in
the avant-garde tradition. Do we still need to discuss gender?
Anna Atkins, Convalaria
Do we need exhibitions of women artists to shine the spotlight Multiflora, 1854
on underrecognized practices? Courtesy the Getty’s
Open Content Program
I think so. At the time of this writing, Hillary Clinton has
clinched the Democratic nomination for president, but the
threat to reproductive rights and women’s scant representation
in boardrooms and in government confirm that there is still much
work to do. In the arts, there is marked gender inequality. Last year
ARTnews cited the paucity of solo exhibitions dedicated to women
in major New York museums (and for women of color, it’s even
more dismal), and a 2014 study, “The Gender Gap in Art Museum
Directorships,” by the Association of Art Museum Directors,
reports that female art museum directors earn substantially less
than their male counterparts. While there has been some progress
since Nochlin’s rallying cry, the artists of this generation are more Can working against photographic
aware than ever of their roles in an imbalanced art world.
Photography has always been hospitable to women, and convention, in a medium that
women have made some of the most radical accomplishments
in nonconventional image making. It’s a relatively new medium,
is still sometimes considered other,
free from the crushing millennia-long history of painting and be viewed as an act of defiance?
sculpture. In its infancy, photography was practiced by scientists
and alchemists, not artists. A photographer didn’t have to be
enrolled in the hallowed halls of the academy; she could cook it up
in the kitchen. Victorian England saw the early botany experiments
of Anna Atkins, narrative allegories by Lady Clementina Hawarden
(featuring her daughters as sitters), and Julia Margaret Cameron’s
purposeful “misuse” of the wet collodion process to create her
signature portraits. The proliferation of mass media and new camera
and printing technologies in the early twentieth century ushered
in radical collages by Hannah Höch, Bauhaus experiments by Lucia
Moholy and Florence Henri, and the modernist compositions of
Tina Modotti. Some women worked in isolation, like Lotte Jacobi,

WORDS 1 0 3
 who created her light drawings in seclusion in New Hampshire;
others had patronage, such as Berenice Abbott, who was
commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to
make pictures of scientific phenomena. The postwar movements
of pop art, land art, conceptual art, and performance art significantly
incorporated photography—Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta,
and Adrian Piper leaned heavily on photography, in all its uses.
Their work is unfathomable without it.
The experimentation, manipulation, and disruption
of photographic conventions of the early twentieth century
reached a crescendo in the century’s last decades. Art of the past
forty years has set the stage for the dominance of contemporary
experiments by women today. Since the 1970s there has been
a plethora of women working in photography (some asserting
they are artists “using photography,” not photographers),
including Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Sarah Charlesworth,
Louise Lawler, Barbara Kasten, Lorna Simpson, Barbara Kruger,
and Carrie Mae Weems. These artists share an interest in the
status, power, and representation of both images and women
within cultural production. They collectively challenge the
chief tenets of traditional photography—originality, faithful
reproduction, and indexicality. While we now refer to many
of the women of this time period as Pictures Generation artists,
Sherman recalls, in a 2003 issue of Artforum, the unprecedented
prevalence of female practitioners:

In the later ’80s, when it seemed like everywhere you looked

people were talking about appropriation—then it seemed
like a thing, a real presence. But I wasn’t really aware of any
group feeling…. What probably did increase the feeling of
community was when more women began to get recognized
for their work, most of them in photography…. I felt there
was more of a support system then among the women artists.
It could also have been that many of us were doing this other
kind of work—we were using photography—but people like
Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer were in there too. There
was a female solidarity.

These women embraced the expansiveness of photography’s

parameters and have deeply informed, animated, and ultimately
liberated the work of the artists who came after.
Recent years have witnessed a generation of women exploring
new ground in the photographic medium. I spoke with several
of them for this article. Liz Deschenes, whose work sits at the
intersection of photography, sculpture, and architecture, is central
to current conversations around nonrepresentational photography.
Working between categories and disciplines, Deschenes is
also deeply rooted in the histories of photographic technologies,
challenging the notion of photography as a fixed discipline.
Deschenes questions and resists all power structures, including
Eileen Quinlan,
Monument Valley, 2015
binaries that confine works of art. Photography is frequently
Courtesy the artist and reduced to polarized classifications—color versus black
Miguel Abreu Gallery,
and white, landscape versus portrait, analog versus digital,
New York
representation versus abstraction. As an educator, she underscores
the medium’s fluidity by introducing disregarded figures
(often women) and so-called alternate histories into her teaching.
Deschenes explains:

It does not make much sense for women to follow conventions.

We have never been adequately included in the general
dialogue around image production. I think women have
carved out spaces in photography because for such a long
time the stakes were so low or nonexistent, that there was
no threat of a takeover. I believe that has shifted with the
female-dominated Pictures Generation.

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Barbara Kasten,
Construct XI A, 1981
Courtesy the artist;
Bortolami, New York;
and Galerie Kadel Willborn,
Düsseldorf

Miranda Lichtenstein, whose lush images have revived the As Lichtenstein suggests, these women opened avenues for new
contemporary still life, similarly cites the influence of the Pictures ways of observing and interrogating the image in today’s culture.
Generation on her work: In the digital age, where photographs are most often images
(that is, JPEGs and TIFFs, not prints), Lichtenstein, Deschenes,
I began working in nontraditional ways with photography and others affirm the material properties of the medium and
because I wanted to push against the images around me contribute to a more malleable idea of photography within a
(particularly of women). I used collage and alternative historical continuum.
processes because it allowed me to transform and control Photography’s history and its relationship to sculpture,
the pictures I was appropriating. I studied under Joel media, and film technologies are central to Sara VanDerBeek’s work.
Sternfeld, so “straight photography” was the dominant Through carefully calibrated photographs of her own temporary
paradigm, but I was lucky enough to see work by women sculptures, neoclassical sculptures, ancient edifices, and architectural
in the early 1990s that had a dramatic impact on me. Laurie details, VanDerBeek has developed an aesthetic language that
Simmons, Sarah Charlesworth, Gretchen Bender, and deftly prods the relationship between photography and sculpture.
Barbara Kruger were some of the artists whose work cleared In addressing the history of sculpture, she shifts a mostly male-
a path for me. dominated history into a contemporary female realm, where object

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and image are leveled. VanDerBeek, whose recent art addresses This page: Opposite:
Liz Deschenes, Gallery Sarah Charlesworth,
“women’s work,” remarks: 4.1.1, installation at MASS Buddha of Immeasurable
MoCA, 2015. Photograph Light, 1987, from the
by David Dashiell series Objects of Desire
This sense that there is a quality of impermanence to our Courtesy the artist; Courtesy the Estate
progress [as women] leads me to photography. Specifically MASS MoCA; Miguel Abreu of Sarah Charlesworth
Gallery, New York; and and Maccarone
I’m referring to its expansive and elastic nature, its space for
Campoli Presti, London/
experimentation and its “democratic” nature. Photography Paris
has always been open to diverse practitioners and throughout
its history it has included the possibility for expression for
many who were not easily allowed into other arenas. I think
some of this does come from its status as “other,” and perhaps,
for me, even more so from its interdependent relationship
with mass media and technology.

Eileen Quinlan, whose photographs are grounded in material

culture, the history of abstraction, feminist history, and, most lately,
the ubiquity of screens, cites the predominance of conventional
photography curriculums as fomenting a type of resistance:

Photographers have always created constructed, nonobjective,

and materially promiscuous pictures. But this history isn’t
Recent years have witnessed
taught, and if it is alluded to, it’s mentioned derisively. a generation of women exploring
Photography remains a male-dominated field, both in
the commercial and fine art sectors, and is saturated with
new ground in the photographic
“straight” photographers who supposedly harness the medium.
medium’s “strengths,” that is, the ability to sharply and
irrefutably record and depict a kind of truth about the world.
Maybe women sense that taking unconventional approaches
to photography will somehow afford us more room to move?
Jan Groover was political when she made abstraction in the
kitchen sink. Working with still life, setup, or self-portraiture
isn’t only about investigating interior or domestic worlds,

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 either. Women are more sensitive to the potential for space for dialogue, debate, and, I would posit, defiance. As a curator
exploitation when we photograph others … as an artist I am who has worked with many of these figures, I have witnessed artists
consciously rejecting much I have been taught about pure creating work, meaning, and community in arenas long hospitable
photography as observation of reality. I understand all to women but outside the mainstream, marshaling a shift from the
photographs to be made rather than taken or found. periphery to the center. Artist Emily Roysdon, in the 2010 catalogue
Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, perhaps
Many of these female artists are educators, and in some cases expressed it best: artists today are not “protesting what we don’t
their roles as teachers can be profoundly impactful. Deschenes want but performing what we do want.”
asserts, “There is no domain within higher photography education
that does not have a male authority and history inscribed in its
hierarchies, curriculum, alumni, buildings, and more. To attempt
to subvert any of that is certainly a political act.” Perhaps the most
important figure in this regard is Charlesworth. Deeply respected
by younger artists (she is cited as an inspiration by those quoted
here), Charlesworth created a vital link between her generation
and the next. She taught, wrote about, conversed with, and
empowered a new generation of artists working in experimental
ways, who, in turn, have made community and dialogue central.
Through her own groundbreaking work and her strong desire
to build community among women artists, Charlesworth
established a space for diverse photographic practices to flourish.
Her advocacy for the medium and its continuation today by
Deschenes, Lichtenstein, Quinlan, Hewitt, and VanDerBeek,
This essay was inspired by conversations
who teach at prestigious schools, has unquestionably influenced with Liz Deschenes during the preparation
the course of photographic history and how it is taught. of her survey exhibition at the Institute
of Contemporary Art, Boston. I am also
Like their work, each artist under discussion presents a
deeply indebted to a community of women
different viewpoint on photography and so-called experimental who have met regularly over the past two
practices. However, together they affirm that the medium years and whose conversations, ideas,
and friendships have animated and
has always been fluid and resistant to typologizing. Through informed my thinking on photography.
exhibiting their work, teaching, publishing, and public and
Eva Respini is the Barbara Lee Chief
private conversations, these artists celebrate the inherently hybrid, Curator at the Institute of Contemporary
pluralistic, and mutable nature of photography, within a robust Art, Boston.

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 Andrea Bowers,
Trans Liberation:
Beauty in the Street
(Johanna Saavedra),
2016
Courtesy the artist and
Andrew Kreps Gallery,
New York

Beyond
Binary
What does photography offer the trans feminism movement?
Julia Bryan-Wilson

She is striding down the middle of the empty street. She is striding In another photograph, McDonald—who was convicted
down the street flanked by palm trees. She is striding down the of manslaughter after defending herself in a racist, transphobic
street in a gray dress and strappy, red, open-toed shoes. She is attack outside a bar in Minneapolis in 2011 and, despite entreaties
striding down the street coming toward us. She is striding down by trans activists, served nineteen months in a men’s prison—is
the street holding a brick in one hand. portrayed as an avenging angel of liberation in a flowing gown with
This large-scale, life-size photograph of Johanna Saavedra— wings spread out behind her and a sledgehammer tucked into her
a trans, Latina activist—is part of Andrea Bowers’s series Trans belt. Bowers, whose practice has long rotated around the imaging
Liberation (2016), produced in collaboration with artist and organizer of social justice struggles, writes, “I wanted to document these
Ada Tinnell. Trans Liberation features three trans women activists activists because I believe they are some of the most powerful and
of color—Saavedra, CeCe McDonald, and Jennicet Gutiérrez— courageous activists of this time. Over 70 percent of hate-motivated
photographed with weapons (brick, hammer, rifle) and in postures murders are against trans women, and 80 percent of those are trans
that nod to historical representations of revolutionary insurrection. women of color.” Gender might not be “real,” to cite theorists of
Saavedra’s brick, for instance, references both a famed graphic social construction, but gender-based oppression certainly is.
from the student/worker uprisings of May 1968 in France and the The photographs comprised only one component of Bowers’s
brick thrown by African American trans pioneer Marsha P. Johnson multimedia exhibition, entitled Whose Feminism Is It Anyway?,
at the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, which helped ignite the gay at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, in spring 2016, but they were
liberation movement in the United States. Even as the photographs the show’s breakthrough centerpiece. The titular question is a direct
confidently portray these women as stunning, beautiful, and strong, quote from an influential essay by trans activist/writer Emi Koyama
by some accounts they are not considered women at all—recently that discusses the racism that accompanies some trans-inclusion
enacted bathroom laws mean their use of certain public ladies’ debates, as various camps stake their claims not only to who owns
rooms is illegal, and they would not have been welcomed at the feminism, but who owns (and who is excluded from) the very
(now defunct) Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival with its “womyn- definition of womanhood. The category of “woman” has never
born-womyn”-only policy. been singular or stable, and many—because of normative ideals

WORDS 1 0 9
 about anatomy, about body size, about race, about age, about
disability—have been barred from its rigid confines. Trans women
of color continue to fight hard to change these conversations,
fights allegorized in these portraits by the weapons wielded by
Saavedra, McDonald, and Gutiérrez.
Bowers is perhaps most well known for her carefully wrought
drawings (some of which were on display in Whose Feminism
Is It Anyway?), but to document these figures as mythic heroines
she turned decisively to photography, with its special capacities
Female photographers have long to depict not only the purported “real” but also to render visible
been riveted by the structures “unreal” or fictive states of being. It is one of the first lessons
to impart in any history of photography class: despite the vaunted
of gender—its theatrics, its truth value of a photograph, it is always the result of a partial,
stereotypes—in order to explode packaged, and framed viewpoint. The photograph’s alleged
transparency is as mediated and produced as any other form
them. of representation.
In a related vein, these photographs perform a denaturalizing
function. Trans activism asks us to rethink the supposed truth
of the binary gender system—one that sorts people at birth into
two inviolable categories (boy or girl) and permits no crossing
between them during a lifetime. In addition, sexist systems of
inequality privilege men above women, as well as masculine above
feminine; to counteract these strictures, trans feminism advocates
for the flourishing of a range of genders and promotes solidarity
between all kinds of women, including those who were born
female and those who were not. Trans feminism also considers
how gender intersects with race, class, ability, and age. It is thus
worth asking: What does photography as an artistic resource,
a visioning technology, and a tool of activist organizing have to
offer the trans feminist movement? Current debates about the
porousness and flexibility of gender identities hinge in part on
questions of visibility and self-presentation—that is, how one
looks, as well as how one looks back, is crucial. These are issues
that photography is uniquely suited to address.
Indeed, Bowers is one of several cisgender—that is, non-
trans—female photographers who have trained their lenses
on trans women (as well as trans men) to ask questions about
the politics of representation and to challenge assumptions about
the potency of appearance and the gendered gaze. In the early
1980s, during the grip of General Augusto Pinochet’s rule in
Chile, photographer Paz Errázuriz embarked on a project in
which she took pictures of trans prostitutes working in clandestine
brothels in Santiago and Talca. As part of her larger effort to
resist the dictatorship and its brutally enforced norms, Errázuriz
photographed marginalized subjects such as circus performers
and those confined to psychiatric hospitals. The resulting series,
La manzana de Adán (Adam’s apple, 1982–87), shows the intimacies
fostered by queer men and trans women in the chosen families
formed within brothels. Decades before the rise of the phrase
trans feminism and the increased mainstreaming of (some) trans
bodies, Errázuriz’s La manzana de Adán sought to capture Chilean
Zackary Drucker and
Rhys Ernst, Relationship,
trans women without shame or stigma. Shot within domestic
#11 (Palindromes), interiors, with many of her subjects staring frankly into the camera,
2008–14 the images dignify rather than spectacularize.
Courtesy the artists and
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles It could be argued that female photographers have long
been riveted by the structures of gender—its theatrics, its
stereotypes—in order to explode them. Artists as varied as
Claude Cahun, Hannah Höch, Paola Peredes, Cindy Sherman,
and Lorna Simpson, working across the span of the twentieth
century, have used photography to interrogate how gender acts
in conjunction with other categories of difference (including race,
class, and sexuality) and to disrupt conventions of femininity.
Some have sought out trans subjects because of their subcultural
or nonnormative jolt—Diane Arbus, for instance, with Miss Stormé
de Larverie, the Lady Who Appears to be a Gentleman, N.Y.C. 1961,

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Zanele Muholi, Yaya
Mavundla, Parktown,
Johannesburg, 2014,
from the series
Brave Beauties
© the artist and courtesy
Stevenson, Cape Town
and Johannesburg, and
Yancey Richardson Gallery,
New York

WORDS 1 1 1
a portrait of a dapper figure seated on a park bench. (De Larverie, to face the lens. The woman’s expression conveys authority,
a queer, biracial drag king, would go on to be a crucial catalyst in self-possession, and trust in the photographer, as well as, by
the 1969 Stonewall pushback against the police.) extension, in us as viewers. Given the violence experienced by
But there is arguably a difference between Arbus’s early 1960s many queer and trans folks in South Africa—and elsewhere—
fascination with trans identities as a visual shorthand for deceit, Muholi considers her photography to be a form of what she calls
surprise, and transgression and the approaches taken by the “visual activism.”
post–gay liberation work of Bowers and Errázuriz. They do not With its abilities to make everyday details vivid, and to provide
rely on titles to invert assumptions about how clothes, hair, and the stage for imaginative excesses, photography plays an important
posture might or might not securely “match” an underlying body. role in the simultaneous construction, and dismantling, of the
Rather, they grasp that one promise of portrait photography is boundaries of “woman.” How might these photographic expressions
that it can particularize, that it can give us some access, however of trans visibility shape, or potentially contribute to, the debates
compromised, to the individual details of the person. (Yes, the around accepting trans feminism, as part of the ongoing struggle
camera can flatten people into types, but it can also lend texture for equality? The stakes of these debates, and these visibilities,
to their specificity.) When cisgendered female photographers are high—for many trans women of color, they can be a matter
aim their cameras at trans bodies (whether male, female, both/and, of life and death. Look again at the photo of Saavedra dressed to
or neither/nor), different questions—but still pertinent questions— kill with the brick in her hand: she is striding down the street and
about the gaze, gender, and power are raised. Thus it is vital that she is unstoppable.
trans-identified artists and photographers like Juliana Huxtable
and Serena Jara are also documenting themselves and expanding
discourses around the aesthetics of embodiment. And Zackary
Drucker and Rhys Ernst’s 2008–14 series Relationship presents
This page:
the two artists and their partnership as they crossed, in opposing Paz Errázuriz, Evelyn I,
directions, the mobile line between male and female. Santiago, 1987, from
the series La manzana
Among the most celebrated recent images of trans women are de Adán
those taken by black, South African, lesbian photographer Zanele © and courtesy the artist
Muholi. Since the early 2000s, Muholi has created meticulous studio
Opposite:
portraits of black LGBT-identified people. In one, Yaya Mavundla, Andrea Bowers,
Parktown, Johannesburg (2014), a woman with a come-hither smile Trans Liberation:
Building a Movement
wears a tangle of necklaces, her hands placed on her upper thigh; (Cece McDonald),
a black garment swoops around her torso and hips, and swings 2016
Julia Bryan-Wilson is Associate Professor Courtesy the artist and
out behind her in a flourish. In another image of defiant glamour, of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Andrew Kreps Gallery,
a woman wearing only high-waisted shorts and a striped hat turns University of California, Berkeley. New York

AP E RTU RE 1 1 2
 Art historians such as Helen Molesworth have looked to
the haptic within the visual arts as a way to break with sensorial
hierarchies and to consider domains such as craft that are often
culturally coded as feminine or queer. Although Pryde specifically
does not disclose the genders of her subjects in Für Mich,
without faces to read, viewers rely on the assumptions that they
make from the nail polish and the models’ poses. In so doing
the artist subtly outs her audience’s preconceptions and perhaps
prejudices, challenging us to consider not just how we expect
bodies to present themselves and images to function, but
how new technologically informed ways of moving—dragging,
dropping, and swiping—might relate to gestures and mannerisms
that are perceived to be masculine or feminine. As curator
Jamie Stevens—who organized Pryde’s exhibition at the

Josephine
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts before it traveled
on to the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania,
in Philadelphia—prompted viewers to ask, “Can what we call
virtual content also reach back into the parts of our lives we

Pryde
might otherwise consider non-virtual?”
Here, touch sensitive might be thought of not just as a
technological term, but as an action, a sensation, or a sentiment.
It describes a world we now expect to be responsive to our
presence. This concept is underscored by the way that Pryde
has, to date, installed her evolving series with titles that read
like rapid-fire texts, such as lapses in Thinking By the person
i Am and These Are Just Things I Say, They Are Not My Opinions.
Alex Klein If circulation in terms of the market and image production
can also be inferred from this body of work, it is made manifest
by the miniature train Pryde places in the different exhibition
venues for viewers to ride on in a prescribed route through
the gallery. Creating a recursive loop, it further mediates the
experience of the photographic display, while simultaneously
highlighting our own limited attention spans. At once a biting
In his endearingly titled book Thumbelina: The Culture and critique of institutional modes and technological transformations,
Technology of Millennials (2014), the philosopher Michel Serres the train is also a wry commentary on the role of interactivity
reflects upon his college-age students, who, for him, embody in the museum. Für Mich as a phrase in itself lends a layered
a new technological order. Not only do they communicate and reading to the project: similar to Serres’s title, it refers to Pryde’s
relate in new ways, but their bodies are decidedly different—their observation of art-school entrance examination panels, during
heads are quite literally in their hands. For artist Josephine Pryde, which young candidates sometimes respond to the tricky question
too, this fusion between the body and the technological device about their motivation to study art with the remark that they
is not just a cyborgian proposition, but an opportunity to imagine want to do so for themselves. While certainly the phrase points
what our heads might now be freed to do if our fingers do to the foregrounded status of the self in the age of social media,
the thinking. This point of contact between the hand and the we might also interpret it as a reflection on the artist herself,
machine, which Pryde describes as “the join,” also represents and the pleasure she derives from making her work.
a gap between what we can literally see and the immense
effects that these changes will inevitably have on the physical
world. It is within these fissures that Pryde suggests a new body
of semiotics in which we might begin to detect a shift in our
sensorial modes, psychic compositions, and perhaps even our
gendered stereotypes.
In an ongoing series of photographs, loosely referred to as
Für Mich (For me), Pryde depicts hands, most of them sporting
brightly colored nail polish in hip hues (which she distinguishes
from traditional shades of “vampy Helmut Newton red”), cradling
an array of objects, many of which are touch-screen devices. At
first these images could be mistaken for an advertising campaign
for the latest smartphone. However, upon further examination,
one notices that other interactions have been given equal
consideration—a hand touching a piece of driftwood, hands
holding gifts given to Pryde by her commercial gallerists, a hand
laid on a chest—prompting us to consider alternate ways of
accessing time, value, and knowledge. Photographed with a
macro lens, the images crop the heads out of frame and focus Alex Klein is Dorothy and Stephen R.
Weber (CHE ’60) Curator at the Institute Gift Für Mich, Galerie
decidedly on the subjects’ hands, evoking a sense of touch and of Contemporary Art, University of Neu Christmas 2014 (2),
the haptic potential embedded within the photographic. Pennsylvania. 2015

AP E RTURE 1 14
Opposite:
Für Mich 2, 2014

This page:
Für Uns 3, 2014

P I CTURE S 1 1 7
This page:
Sorry Not Sorry, 2016

Opposite:
Your Secure and
Private Path, 2015
All photographs courtesy the
artist and Simon Lee Gallery,
London/Hong Kong

AP E RTU RE 1 1 8
 Talking openly and publicly about abortion is one of Western
society’s most enduring taboos. Even in the few countries
where access to abortion is not restricted, attempts to raise
consciousness about abortion invariably are met with clenched
fists and racing pulses, with most people presenting fully
developed, strong views that render any civil discussion
futile, if not impossible. The subject’s volatility increases
exponentially in regions in which Catholicism is entangled
with government policy, dramatically limiting abortion on
religious grounds.
On Abortion (2016), a research-based project by Spanish-
born, Barcelona-based artist Laia Abril, provides a harrowing
record of the repercussions of governmental and societal
restrictions on abortion. With approximately ninety photographs
and accompanying expository texts, On Abortion traces the
long history of women’s struggles for access to family planning
methods, including contraception and pregnancy termination.
Abril’s photographs take the form of portraits, documentary
shots, and restaged scenes, with archival images added into
the fold. She highlights objects that played a role in this struggle:
early versions of condoms made out of fish bladders and sheep
gut; gossypol, a compound found in cottonseed that drastically
reduces a man’s sperm count; rudimentary surgical tools.

Laia
Haunting stories of women and girls who have been denied
access to abortion—whether impregnated by consensual sex,
rape, or incest; whether with or without life-threatening pregnancy
complications—contextualize the images, driving home the
trauma that surrounds abortion both as a personal experience
and a societal taboo. Abril masterfully editorializes her visual
research, respectfully conveying the women’s poignant

Abril
experiences without the work coming across as propaganda.
On Abortion represents one chapter of a larger work in
progress titled A History of Misogyny, in which Abril compares
the present with the past. “I focused on the repercussions of
lack of access to abortion, since these are so extreme and urgent
that people can’t look away,” she said in a recent studio visit.
“I always try to enter a story through a narrative of intimacy,
to break down prejudices and show facts in order to help people
understand that free and open access to abortion is an essential
human right.”
While Abril is first and foremost an artist, she has a
background in journalism and her practice is intensely research-
Karen Archey based. Abortion was not originally intended as the first subject
for A History of Misogyny, but extensive research led the
artist to realize how dire repercussions of abortion restrictions
really are: worldwide each year, approximately 47,000 women
die from botched abortions and millions unwillingly carry
pregnancies to term. Abortion availability and contraceptive
access, which are most often decided by men, are largely
sidelined as women’s issues, rather than human rights and
political issues, as On Abortion attests. Abril delves into the past
to comment on the present state of abortion and family planning
rights, illustrating the significant impacts that result when these
rights are denied.

Karen Archey is an art critic and

independent curator based in Berlin.

AP E RTURE 1 20
Portrait of Magdalena, 32, Poland
“It was December 17, 2014. I took a pregnancy test and it came out positive. I am gay—I don’t want to talk about
how I got pregnant. I don’t know for sure if my grief for the abortion is over, if I left it all behind. I think about it
once in a while, and sometimes I cry. Not much, though, and not because I regret it. I don’t. I know I made the
right choice, and the only possible one. It was the hardest experience in my life. I am a different person now.
And I’m proud of myself.” —Magdalena

Abortion is legal in nearly all EU countries, except Poland, Ireland, and Malta. In Poland abortion is illegal except
in cases of sexual assault, serious fetal deformation, or threat to the mother’s life. The official number of abortions
performed in this country with 38 million inhabitants is only about 750 per year. According to Dutch pro-choice
organization Women on Waves, the real number is closer to 240,000.

P I CTU RE S 1 21
Portrait of Neil, 33, Ireland
“In 2010, my wife Michelle and I found out we were pregnant. She was over the moon, although I was worried and
realistic—she had been fighting cancer since 2001 and was terminal. Unfortunately, her chemotherapy treatment
had probably damaged the fetus, before we even knew there was one. Michelle was also unlikely to survive a
pregnancy. Her oncologist prescribed an abortion. Michelle did not want to, but we had no other option. To our
surprise, Cork University Hospital refused to do it.” —Neil

In Ireland abortion is illegal unless it occurs as the result of a medical intervention performed to save the life
of the mother.

AP E RTURE 1 22
Human Incubator
On November 27, 2014, an Irish woman in her twenties was admitted to a hospital with headaches and nausea.
Two days later, the mother of two suffered a fall and was later found unresponsive. On December 9, she was
declared clinically brain dead. She was fifteen weeks pregnant at the time, and was placed on life support
against her family’s wishes.

On December 26, the High Court of Ireland ruled that the life-support machine could be turned off after hearing
that her fetus had little chance of surviving. Under the 1983 eighth amendment of the Irish constitution, an unborn
child has the same rights as its mother.

Zika
Aedes aegypti mosquitoes transmit the feared Zika virus to pregnant women, who can pass it to their unborn
children. Recent Zika outbreaks in Brazil have been linked to microcephaly in babies. In early 2016, the Brazilian
government recorded 3,893 new cases of the fetal anomaly.

The World Health Organization has urged increased access to abortion for pregnant women infected with Zika in
Latin America, but the procedure remains limited in Brazil, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras,
Haiti, Paraguay, and El Salvador. Several health authorities have recommended that local women avoid pregnancy
for up to two years.
10,000 Women Exposed on Television
In 2007, Dr. Neide Mota Machado’s family-planning clinic in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, was revealed as an
abortion provider by a hidden camera television news exposé. Throughout twenty years of practice, the clinic
had kept files from 10,000 illegal abortions, and in 2008, public prosecutors decided to find and punish past patients.
The director of the clinic herself faced twenty-five to seventy-nine years in prison. In the weeks before her trial,
she was found dead inside her car with a syringe.

Abortion in Brazil is only legal if the woman’s life is in danger or the pregnancy is the result of a rape.

Sentenced to Thirty Years

Court files of seventeen women in El Salvador accused of homicide after miscarrying. They are serving sentences of up to
thirty years. Two were recently pardoned (after being in jail for nine and twelve years, respectively), but many new cases are
being added to the list. Since 1998, abortion has been illegal in El Salvador under any circumstance, even if a woman’s life is at
risk. Social stigma can provoke witch hunts for women who suffer miscarriages or obstetric complications outside the hospital.

According to the Salvadoran Citizens’ Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion, more than 250 women were reported
to the police between 2000 and 2014 for abortion. Of them, 147 were prosecuted and 49 convicted: 26 for murder and
23 for abortion.
Portrait of Guadalupe, 26, El Salvador
“At seventeen I was raped, and I got pregnant. A few months later I was sentenced to thirty years for homicide.
I had had an obstetric emergency at twenty-eight weeks of pregnancy, while I was working at my employer’s
house; she did not allow me to go home and I passed out in the bedroom. I wanted my baby, I don’t know
what happened to her; they never returned her body to my family. I spent seven years and seven months in
prison until I was pardoned. The day I was released was a very joyful moment. It had been a long fight, and
the lawyers had kept visiting me and updating me about the process. Now I have a newborn baby daughter
and I’m thrilled to be a mom.” —Guadalupe

All works from A History

of Misogyny, Chapter
One: On Abortion, 2016
Courtesy the artist

P I CTURE S 1 25
This page:
Arun (Rose Studios Satwa),
2014

Opposite:
Abaya Shop
Advertisement, 2016

Farah
Al Qasimi
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer, critic,

and contributing editor of the magazine
Bidoun.

AP E RTU RE 1 26
Farah Al Qasimi started taking pictures a long way from home. shopping malls, and traditional pharmacies, seeking out their
Born in Abu Dhabi and raised in the United Arab Emirates, she services, as research, but also photographing their spaces
was a college student in New England when she took her first of encounter and exchange. She started finding answers to
photography class. “I want to say the first image I successfully her questions in one series of images titled Make Me Beautiful
developed was of a street on a rainy day and it was totally (2014–16) and another called Coming Up Roses (2015–16).
unremarkable,” she recalls. “I went on to photograph some Only five or six years have passed since Qasimi first
pretty bleak things that semester. It was cold,” she says, “and picked up a camera. Her Instagram feed is a glorious mix of
I was lonely and homesick.” Nothing really fell into place until high art and everyday image inundation, and between them
she went home and began shooting in color. The aesthetics of the boundaries are blurred. The intellectual armature of her
the Gulf, and the Emirates in particular, are especially attuned work is both conceptually fleet and surprisingly solid for someone
to lushness, saturation, glitter, shine, bling, texture, pattern, so young. Look for long enough at her photograph of smashed
decoration, and the extremes of fantasy and desire as expressed pomegranates on a marble floor, or of a girl in fuchsia velour,
through material things. her body crouched over her head and hands on a plush red carpet,
Qasimi embraced all of that in her work but also pushed and suddenly a disquisition on exoticism and vulnerability comes
it further. She wondered why the photography studios where into view. The bright lights of a jewelry store at night appear both
she went to have her passport pictures taken always retouched chipper and sad. Portraits of happy families and women dolled
her image to whiten her skin. She wondered why baroque interiors up like pop stars are large enough to dwarf a photographer in
were so wildly popular in Emirati homes even as they nearly his studio, becoming ominous, almost monstrous. A picture of
disguised the women and girls who lived in them. She wondered nine mannequins in full-face niqabs offers an ambiguous critique
about the politics of beauty and the visibility of women. of power, retail, and femininity. A pair of high heels on a hidden
She wondered about feminism, the truth-telling function of figure anchors an otherwise abstract image. “In the Emirates,
photography, and the history of orientalist portraiture. Qasimi decoration and fiction become forms of escape,” says Qasimi.
spent her weekends going to photography studios, beauty salons, “Places are full of joy and longing. I find it very moving.”

P I CTURE S 1 27
M Napping on Carpet,
2016

Overleaf:
S with Floral Fabric, 2015
Self-Portrait in Red, 2015
All photographs courtesy
the artist and The Third Line,
Dubai
MARTINE SYMS
Amanda Hunt

AP E RTU RE 1 3 2
 Another week, another video depicting the execution of a black
man at the hands of a police officer goes viral. Another black
man rendered absent: Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Alton Sterling,
Philando Castile … when do I stop? And what of the black
women who are prematurely disappeared? It is with this horrific
backdrop of continued abuse of power—which has resulted
in 559 deaths at the hands of U.S. law enforcement in 2016
alone (as of July 8), only a fraction of which have actually been
visualized—that I can begin to talk about the positive power
of Martine Syms’s art, feminism, and photographic presentation
of black women, black life, black power.
Syms’s work, foremost, is a conflation of image and text—
both are primary to her practice. For a number of years Syms
was the director of Golden Age, a Chicago-based project space
focused on printed matter. She later founded Dominica Publishing,
an imprint for artists that continues today. This fundamental
relationship to and engagement with language connects all
Stills from Notes on of her endeavors. As with her writing, Syms’s development of a
Gesture, 2015. Single- visual aesthetic references the structures of cinema and television.
channel video, 10:27
minutes (loop), color,
The artist states that she is creating a relationship between image
sound and text in order to produce a resultant “third meaning.” Now

P I CTU RE S 1 3 3
Previous spread:
Fact & Trouble,
installation at Institute
of Contemporary Arts,
London, 2016

based in Los Angeles, Syms is closer to the Hollywood apparatus;

this proximity is evidenced in her art, almost having become
a character itself. But the most constant character of all is that
of a black, female protagonist.
Vertical Elevated Oblique (2015), Syms’s first solo
exhibition in New York, at Bridget Donahue, offered an
overtly technical installation comprising video, photographs,
and staged objects, as well as a space for books from Dominica
Publishing. For Notes on Gesture (2015), the featured video,
Syms employed a female, black actor to enact gestures readily
associated with black women and blackness. Interspersed
with shocks of text (“DON’T JUDGE”; “WHEN IT AIN’T
ABOUT THE MONEY”), Notes on Gesture is an exercise in
nonverbal expression. The video essentializes the essentializing:
black women as sassy, finger-snapping, mm-hmming folks.
Gestures of blackness are often co-opted, but here we do not
know which gesture is authentic or which acts as a quotation.
Syms presents an intentional flatness to the image that
supports the myth and refutes the dimensionality of its subject.
But is this body and identity really just an empty vessel of
expression?

AP E RTURE 1 3 6
 This spread:
Stills from She Mad:
Laughing Gas, 2016.
Four-channel video
installation, 6:59 minutes
(loop), color, sound
All works © the artist and
courtesy Dominica Publishing
and Bridget Donahue,
New York

The installation of Vertical Elevated Oblique smartly The power of what Syms does is not only in its visual
collapsed language and image, layering pop culture with strength, but also in its political implications in an art world
enduring symbols of both Hollywood (industrial stands used in marked by a dearth of diversity in proprietors and artists
film production now held up Syms’s photographs) and the black alike, and in a media universe that suppresses (whether
resistance (a flock-covered black panther, originally intended consciously or not at this point) positive images of black life.
as a support for a glass tabletop, co-opted from the Black Panther Syms, by simply representing “herself”—and specifically
movement by the home and now repurposed by Syms). black women—in the context of institutional, commercial,
Syms’s photography-based work is a conscious resistance and codified spaces, is asserting her presence. And that,
that rejects what we see in the media—a construction of what by nature, is feminist and political.
is real—and flips the balance simply by the fact that it is Syms
behind the camera, creating her images. If images of black
people are going to continue to be fed into an endless and
cruel cycle of stereotype, we may as well control the output—
present them as mundane and normal, insert them into history,
and reassert them in the contemporary. Syms’s video She Mad:
Laughing Gas (2016), modeled on a silent film, Laughing Gas,
from 1907, does exactly that. We follow Syms-as-protagonist
to the dentist, where she engages with the hygienist, gets high
on the titular gas, and is ultimately denied coverage for the
visit by her insufficient health insurance. A distinctly American Amanda Hunt is Assistant Curator at the
experience. Studio Museum in Harlem.

P I CTU RE S 1 3 7
Our Bodies,
Online
Carmen Winant

What are the qualifications of being a feminist artist today? This

is an impossible question, which is, in many ways, the point. One
of the defining doctrines of third-wave feminism (or fourth-wave
feminism, or postfeminism, or whatever you call our current
moment) is its persistent unwillingness to be defined. Whether you
make abstract photograms or stag films, label your work feminist,
and it is.
As a feminist contrivance, this idea is either liberating or
naive, depending on whom you ask, and, likely, in which decade
you were born. In either case, it’s a jagged break from the second-
wave feminist art movement that predated it—a movement that
adhered, by its very design, to a strict set of ideological guidelines.
Much like the activist organizations from which this movement
grew (which aimed to achieve specific goals like legalizing abortion,
passing the Equal Rights Amendment, establishing equal pay and
free, universal childcare), feminist art of the 1960s, 1970s, and early
1980s was determined to raze oppressive structures with a new
and defined set of rules all its own. “The master’s tools will never
dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde famously declared
in 1979. According to both the political and creative arms of the
movement, any device that utilized patriarchal means was pointedly
unfeminist and thereby an inadmissible agent of real social change.
Though born from a desire to achieve equality, some of these
mandates around what feminism could and could not be eventually
became exclusive, limiting, and problematic. Activist groups
such as New York Radical Women came to regularly vote out their
leaders for being “unsisterly,” leaders of the National Organization
Top: for Women distanced themselves from lesbian feminists—whom
Petra Collins, from the Betty Friedan labeled a “lavender menace”—and male children
series The Teenage Gaze,
2010–15 were banned from feminist separatist communes such as Womyn’s
Bottom: Land. At its zenith, this essentialist dogma thwarted the momentous
Petra Collins, from the
series Selfie, 2013–16
gains of the second-wave movement. At the same time, artists like
© the artist Betty Tompkins and Anita Steckel, whose paintings were considered

AP E RTURE 1 3 8
 Mayan Toledano,
Emma, 2015

Above:
Mayan Toledano,
Sherris in Palm Springs,
2014

Left:
Mayan Toledano, Lindsay,
Long Island, 2015
All photographs courtesy
the artist

AP E RTURE 14 0
too explicitly pornographic and thereby aligned with the patriarchal
gaze, were largely excluded from the pale. Hannah Wilke was
criticized for being too stereotypically beautiful (and thereby
narcissistic) to represent her work’s feminist politics.
Almost half a century later, Instagram, the rise of selfie
culture, American Apparel aesthetics, and amateur pornography—
channels of visual communication that would have been impossible
to fathom within the context of the pre-Internet women’s liberation
movement—have come into being. An emerging guard of young,
female photographers has carved out a new brand of feminism with
a new set of definitions: Amalia Ulman created “hipster lifestyle”
porn, to be viewed only within a gallery setting titled International
House of Cozy (2015). Arvida Byström’s series There Will Be Blood
(2012) pictures women in their lacy, period-stained underwear
(she also regularly photographs herself and other young women
in various states of undress in front of bright, pastel backdrops).
Molly Soda’s project Should I Send This? (2015) is comprised of
titillating, seminude, and headless selfies that the artist took but
never forwarded on to romantic partners. Audrey Wollen’s series
Repetition (2014–15) features the artist posing nude or seminude
as she imitates and embodies historic works of art made by men
such as Bas Jan Ader, Botticelli, and Velázquez. Mayan Toledano’s
photographs for her brand Me and You—cocreated with Julia
Baylis—are of young women posing topless in bed while wearing
Me and You’s most recognizable product: women’s underwear that
has the word feminist printed across the backside in pink. These
artists frequently collaborate, curate one another into exhibitions,
tag and promote each other on social media, and appear as subjects
in each other’s work. The commercial, editorial, and creative
ventures are part of a larger, allied cohort that is rapidly gaining
popular visibility.
Among them, Petra Collins’s work is perhaps the most
prominent. In addition to a creative practice—a recent project is
of adolescent girls in the process of taking selfies—Collins counts
Vogue, Elle, Wonderland, and i-D magazines as editorial clients,
and has shot advertising work for Levi’s, Adidas, Stella McCartney,
and Calvin Klein. Across all of these practices, her 35mm images
are recognizable as crude and dreamy. Collins’s use of gel filters,
pastel palettes, and high grain is uncannily reminiscent of Bob
Guccione’s signature Penthouse magazine style, and likewise owes
a debt to Ryan McGinley (for whom she has posed on numerous
occasions) and Nan Goldin before that. However, unlike Goldin’s
women, whose whole bodies project a wild and gleeful pathos,
Collins—when she shoots commercially—often zooms in on her
subject’s breasts, lips, or asses, their bodies bathed in warm, gauzy
light. For all their sexual potency, Goldin’s photographs of Greer
Lankton and Cookie Mueller don’t resemble other popular images
of women; they feel at once beaten down and ferocious. Collins’s
photographs of female subjects for fashion magazines, in which
Top: Bottom:
models pose in sauna-soaked underwear and lacy negligees, are Amalia Ulman, Excellences Amalia Ulman, Excellences
notably more domesticated. & Perfections (Instagram & Perfections (Instagram
Update, 2nd July 2014), Update, 19th May 2014),
Yet Collins consistently makes the case for her work as being 2014 (I wish I was paler), 2014
driven by her deeply rooted feminist ideals, as do many—if not Courtesy the artist, James
Fuentes, and Arcadia Missa
all—of the photographers of this cohort. The question, then, of
what qualifies work as feminist art in today’s cultural landscape
circles closely around this group of artists. Byström, the Swedish
photographer and self-defined “strident feminist” who has posed
for Toledano and collaborated with Collins, told Dazed, “You can’t
just make ‘feminist art’ because feminism is more like a spectrum
of things; it changes and depends on its context.” This notion—
that feminism can be whatever you want it to be, and that there
are as many feminisms as there are women—appears to sharply
contradict the exacting boundaries and idealistic aspirations
of the preceding movement. It is, perhaps, the prevailing definition
of feminism embraced by Collins and her peers.

WORDS 141
Mayan Toledano, Prestel, the publisher of Babe—a 2015 Collins-curated book
Tessa in Mizpe, 2014
Courtesy the artist that includes work by over thirty artists who have been part of
her online collective, the Ardorous—promotes the collection as
“reflect[ing] an all-accepting, affirming, distinct point of view that
teens and young women everywhere can respond to.” Barnes &
Noble blurbs Collins as “leading the way in a contemporary girl
power revolution that proves feminism and sexuality aren’t mutually
exclusive,” and various places online promote the book as “help[ing]
us to refocus and remember that we are all a part of the struggle
together.” This publisher-scripted language is not far removed
from the manner in which the photographers and their surrounding
An emerging guard of young, community describe their work. For instance, Collins did an
interview with the site StyleLikeU titled “Sorry Not Sorry, Women
female photographers has carved Have Body Hair” (and subtitled, “Another female power house
out a new brand of feminism is stripping down in the name of self-love, femininity, and body
acceptance”) while slowly disrobing down to her underwear.
with a new set of definitions. Posted on YouTube, it drew several comments by men bemoaning
the fact that she never removes her bra.
In her essay “Censorship and the Female Body,” published
in 2013 by the Huffington Post, Collins rebukes Instagram’s decision
to remove her profile based on a photograph she posted showing
her crotch with some exposed pubic hair, writing:

I know having a social media profile removed is a 21st century

privileged problem—but it is the way a lot of us live. These
profiles mimic our physical selves and a lot of the time are even
more important. They are ways to connect with an audience,
to start discussion, and to create change…. To all the young
girls and women, do not let this discourage you, do not let
anyone tell you what you should look like, tell you how to be,
tell you that you do not own your body. Even if society tries
to silence you keep on going, keep moving forward, keep
creating revolutionary work, and keep this discourse alive.

Collins shows real dedication to challenging censorship and

promoting body positivity through her work (and is aware that
her position is a privileged one), which is focused on reclaiming
the female body by utilizing the techniques and tools of the male
gaze. Censorship is, of course, a crucial feminist issue, as is sexual
expression, freedom, and agency—all addressed head-on by
these photographers. The characterization of this particular case
of censorship being a “21st century privileged problem” that
nevertheless represents “the way a lot of us live,” though, hints
at the paradox inherent in much of this work. Can an inclusive and
far-reaching feminism develop within the confines of a Western-
minded social-media universe that upholds the status quo of
capitalism—the begetter of privilege and the patriarchy alike?
If the rhetoric surrounding this kind of imagery is under
question, the images themselves flirt with something undeniably
interesting: the tension between provocation and objectification.
Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,”
now almost four decades old, might have been written about this
very charge:

The erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force

to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb
to the belief that sensation is enough. The erotic has often been
misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made
into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized
sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from
the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source
of power and information, confusing it with its opposite,
the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the
power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true
feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

AP E RTU RE 14 2
Audrey Wollen,
Rokeby Venus, repetition
of Rokeby Venus by
Diego Velázquez, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Locating the boundary between the erotic-as-power and the and commercial entities) to dismantle the master’s house (patriarchal
erotic-as-bondage can be a complex task, as is manifest in a recent expectations of gender). Let’s remember that Audre Lorde and
project by Amalia Ulman. For Excellences & Perfections (2014), the antipornography activist Andrea Dworkin, who passed away
she posted hundreds of hypersexual, blank-faced selfies on in 1992 and 2005, respectively, would have been old enough to
Instagram, accruing up to six hundred likes on a single photograph. be grandmothers to this new generation of feminists. Movements
In describing how young women now self-present in images evolve and revolt against themselves; axioms shift over time and
on the Internet, Peggy Orenstein’s book Girls and Sex (2016) aptly in relationship to culture. Rather than ask this group of artists to
pins the type of account that Ulman’s spoofs as “a commercialized, resemble the feminists that came before them, critics, consumers,
one-dimensional, infinitely replicated, and, frankly, unimaginative and practitioners alike should be promoting an unabashed and
vision of sexiness … [set to] perform rather than to feel sensuality.” exacting dialogue around the politics of looking and image making.
By the time that Ulman eventually revealed that she was playing This is a generation that has had access to mobile devices
a fictional character in an act of cultural sendup, she had accrued and image-centric web platforms from preadolescence as a part
almost 90,000 new followers. In a moment in which feminist art of daily life; this technological and commercial divide naturally
is defined primarily by its immediate context and authorial claims shapes their creative instincts, and sets them apart from previous
(Ulman herself does not identify her practice as “feminist” or makers. Molesworth concluded our conversation by reminding
ascribing to any other political categorization), this work—which me, “Though there are some basic operating principles and values,
has been digitally archived by Rhizome at the New Museum and there is no one theoretical position on feminism that works for
will be exhibited at the Tate Modern this year—could be considered everyone.” So long as it is self-critically vested in challenging
incisive or lacking rigor. In any case, by reveling in the exhibitionism modes of power, feminism can, and must, be a continually evolving
she seeks to critique, Ulman’s work gets to have it both ways. phenomenon. No matter the generation of feminism to which
Feminist curator and critic Helen Molesworth told me recently one ascribes, expansive and rigorous definitions do exist; let’s set
that “in addition to the understanding that feminism is structured about reclaiming them.
on absence—the absence of women’s experience, of bodies of
color—a feminist is someone who is aware that you can’t change
the patriarchy just by inserting women into it.” Is the fact that it was
made by a woman enough to qualify it as progressive or political?
Would we read these same images differently if Terry Richardson
or Richard Kern—a mentor of Collins—made them? Is it possible
to at once challenge codified systems of feminized beauty while
photographing for the very fashion magazines that reinforce them?
Can feminism successfully protest sexism through the personal
choice of self-objectification, using what Zoë Heller described
skeptically in her New York Review of Books essay “‘Hot’ Sex &
Young Girls” as “the emancipatory possibilities of hotness”?
When untangling the complex questions posed by the work
of these artists, it’s important to recognize that these women Carmen Winant is an artist, writer,
and Professor of Visual Studies and
deliberately take control of the master’s tools (porn, Instagram, Contemporary Art History at Columbus
high-end fashion advertising, lifestyle magazines, other corporate College of Art and Design.

WORDS 14 3
AP E RTU RE 14 4
 Elle
Pérez
Salamishah Tillet

Euforia Latina. Bronx Underground. Autonomous queer spaces

now disappeared from the American urban landscape. Rather
than have them live on as remnants in the minds of those
who found haven there, Elle Pérez insists on their presence.
Her photographs are a form of counter-memory, a practice
that philosopher Michel Foucault describes as actively reviving
the past to resist historical obscurity and narrative death.
Pérez was born the year before Jennie Livingston released
Paris Is Burning, a 1990 documentary initially heralded for
its provocative characters and its unprecedented exposure
of New York’s queer, black, and Latino ballroom culture to
mainstream America. In retrospect, what was seen as the
film’s innovation can now seem to be racial and class exploitation:
Livingston neither turns the camera back onto herself nor turns
it over to the stars. “As a twenty-two-year-old from the Bronx
watching Paris Is Burning for the first time, it was like falling
in love with yourself through a white gaze,” Pérez told me.
“That’s what I am fighting against in my work.”
And yet, Pérez’s photographs are more empathetic than
embattled. Her close-up shots, a few staged, mostly improvised,
capture the offscreen rather than the nightclub’s main attraction.

P I CTURE S 14 5
AP E RTU RE 14 8
 Those moments before the moment. A stairwell before going
in or leaving the party. Backstage pageant prep. Peering from
behind the curtain. A Selina catsuit hanging midair. A slow inhale.
A tight embrace.
That her photographs are from different places might matter
for the official record. Some are taken at Euforia Latina, the
Latin club night held at Baltimore’s popular Club Hippo, which
first opened in 1972. Others are from the Bronx Underground,
a punk show hosted at the First Lutheran Church of Throgs
Neck, in the Bronx, for fourteen years. Both places permanently
closed their doors in 2015, shortly after Pérez captured them
for posterity. “In the beginning, I thought I was photographing
for the future,” Pérez said. “Because these people would have
been left out of the history of punk.”
That her photographs refuse their geographical specificity
is the point. These images flatten space, giving us a sense that
we are watching both the entertainers and their spectators
in media res and waiting for each other. Even more poignantly,
Pérez’s black-and-white portraits dislodge these scenes from
their respective years of 2014 and 2015 and situate the viewer
fully in the present or transport us back to the neopunk scene
of the early 2000s or to the roaring Harlem ballrooms of the 1980s.
Here, we are all part of an intimate experiment in out-of-timeness
in which space and temporality are deconstructed, each moment
rendered eternally new.
Pérez’s counterarchive then becomes an alternative to
erasure. Taken together, these photographs create their own
imagined community, to use the phrase coined by historian
Benedict Anderson, in which people are joined by shared
experiences or collective memories rather than by the more
traditional borders of the nation-state. Unlike the racial and
sexual othering in Paris Is Burning, Pérez, working in settings
of emotional familiarity, takes her subjects, their queerness,
and their blackness and brownness for granted. By doing so,
she recenters all LGBT individuals as normative, everyday,
and utterly beautiful.
Amid the euphoria and exaltation there is now a stinging
sadness as we juxtapose Pérez’s images against the backdrop
of those brutally murdered on Latin Night at Orlando’s Pulse
nightclub this past June. And while Pulse’s owner defiantly vows
to keep its doors open, Pérez’s photographs are their own form
of memory-justice, ones that we need now more than ever.

Pages 144–45:
Karila, 2015
Page 146, top:
Dollar Thrust, 2014
Page 146, bottom:
Sophia Campbell, 2014
Page 147, top:
Curtain Peek, 2014
Page 147, bottom:
Salamishah Tillet is an associate professor Kate, 2015
of English and Africana Studies and a This spread:
faculty member in the Alice Paul Center Kirsten, 2015
for Research on Gender, Sexuality, and All photographs courtesy
Women at the University of Pennsylvania. the artist

P I CTU RE S 14 9
 CALL FOR
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deadline for entry
January 1, 2017
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March 4 – April 30, 2017
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Detail, Daughter of a Slave, Timbuktu, West Africa by Robert Moran, PhotoSpiva 2016

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PHOTOGRAPHY
www.mica.edu/aperture

Photos by Colette Veasey-Cullors ’96, from the series Home at Last.

MICA Photography Department Chair. MICA faculty since 2008.
 Object Lessons
Les Femmes de l’Avenir,
1900–1902

Les Femmes de l’Avenir (Women of the future), 1900–1902 Courtesy Sebastien Lifshitz/Textuel
They were the women of the future: the lawyers, doctors, Suffrage Movement, (I’ve suffered ever since!)” declared one
and police officers. But, in these satirical postcards, produced colorful American postcard illustrating a “feminized” man
in France at the turn of the twentieth century, their professions cleaning the floor in a striped apron. Others imagined men
are solely masculine. At the time, the French language itself, cooking, surely an exotic sight, or resentfully looking after
which considers nouns to be either feminine or masculine, a baby.
couldn’t conceive of a female mayor or second lieutenant, The most radical women have always dared to break with
or any job in the public interest. (To this day, there is no feminine convention, in language or comportment. Madeleine Pelletier,
word for judge—or plumber.) And while these women might a French psychiatrist and social advocate in the early twentieth
be emancipated through their imaginary métiers, their fashions century, had no time for fancy dresses. Secretary of the
tell a different story. If they’re not sexualized with bare arms and organization Women’s Solidarity and the subject of photographic
tight uniforms, they’re butched up, neutralized, and swathed portraits in the 1910s, she wrote about feminist education,
in big coats and top hats. promoted genderless names for girls and boys, and kept her
When such cards were in circulation, French feminists hair short. Pelletier refused clothes that objectified a woman’s
and antifeminists were embattled. Accusing working women body. “I do not understand why these ladies don’t see the vile
of becoming “virile,” antifeminists portrayed the desire servitude that lies in displaying their breasts,” she said. “I will
for equality as a threat to the social order, and a danger to show off mine when men adopt a special sort of trouser showing
the family. In the United States, women seeking the vote off their—.” Madeleine Pelletier wasn’t a femme de l’avenir.
were envisioned as emasculating. “My wife’s joined the She was ahead of her time. —The Editors

AP E RTURE 1 5 2