Tate Artist Rooms: Robert Mapplethorpe (Aberystwyth Arts Centre)

Self-Portrait, 1980

I have always wanted to be one of the kids. One of those kids that gave Patti Smith's wonderful "Just Kids" its title. It's a tender longing to have seen the wild years of the late 1960s and 1970s, to spend nights and have conversations with the likes of William Burroughs, Janis Joplin and, naturally, Robert Mapplethorpe. But having been conceived a couple of decades to late, I remain as one of the kids who dress in black, turn off the radio whenever Taylor Swift is playing, and nurture their unrequited love for Mapplethorpe by visiting every exhibition they can. 

This month, I had the chance to see his work in the Arts Centre in Aberystwyth/Wales as part of the Tate Artist Rooms tour. And let's be frank, seeing Robert Mapplethorpe's beautiful photographs of his friends and of himself on the wall almost feels like a proper journey through time, and is probably as good as it can get in the year 2015. 

I saw some of Mapplethorpe's work curated by Isabelle Huppert at Paris Photo last year, but didn't find it as poignant or impressive as this year's small retrospective in Aberystwyth. Presenting a fairly small number of images (compared to Mapplethorpe's extensive oeuvre), the Tate cleverly managed to assemble a collection that is comprehensive but not overwhelming, and a nice introduction to Mapplethorpe's work in general. The focus is on the (self-)portraits, with only little room given to his still-lifes, which does wonders for the cohesion of the exhibition.

If you made your way through the display the right way round, it would start with Mapplethorpe's early self portraits, which he would use to perfect his photographic technique, then take you on a expedition through the Hotel Chelsea and Andy Warhol's The Factory, encountering Philip Glass, Keith Haring and Iggy Pop, exploring Mapplethorpe's more thematically constructed projects on the way, to finish on the self-portraits taken towards the end of his life, concluding the trip with a haunting close-up of his eyes. Just like "Just Kids" the exhibition traces Robert Mapplethorpe's life with a sentimental note, but the centre stage is taken by vivid, extravagant characters, be it his many alter-egos or the soon-to-be-famous poets, artists, bon vivants that he captured one by one.

Marianne Faithfull, 1976

They stare back at you, one by one, as you progress through the exhibition. Working a similar trick like Zanele Muholi years later, Mapplethorpes images live of the eye contact made between his subjects and his medium format camera, and consequently, the viewer. The eyes draw you in, image after image, they form the punctum, the first focal point, throwing you into the moment of the pressed shutter, into the situation, turning you into one of the kids, tête-a-tête with Marianne Faithfull. The exhibition's catalogue describes Robert Mapplethorpe's relationship with eyes, somewhat gloomily, in the following way:

"By training his camera on his eyes, and on his eyes only, Mapplethorpe has concentrated on those organs and on that faculty that determined his career. These eyes, sunk into his head and surrounded by lines, are the eyes of a sick man - Mapplethorpe was to die of an AIDS-related illness in a few months' time - but also the eyes of a brave and unflinching man, determined to outstare death."

One exception for me is Mapplethorpe's portraits of Andy Warhol where I always look at Warhol's hands first - at the awkward posture, the long white fingers fidgeting nervously. I love how these images are not controlled to the finest detail, how they encapsulate Warhol's uneasy nature - these photographs show Robert Mapplethorpe's artistry at its finest, his command of the portrait in its truest sense, candidly showing us the person, breaking them open with the camera. My favourite image is of Patti Smith, taken in Mapplethorpe's bare loft apartment. She crouches, naked, ribs showing, holding herself to heating pipes, an earnest stare underneath a nest of dark hair. She looks confident in her vulnerability, not shying away from the camera. It is a simple, but stunningly beautiful composition; the play of shapes and strong lines so beloved (and mastered) by Mapplethorpe stronger than ever. 

Patti Smith, 1976

The real surprise for me at this exhibition was the quality of the prints. Having seen a couple of shows at the Arts Centre and having squinted more than once at badly blown up digital prints in distracting lighting, the original prints acquired by the Tate constitute a lovely change. Some of them dating back to the early 1980s, they are just delightful, as they softly grasp the full potential of black and white medium format film, bringing out every shade in between the darkest black and the brightest white without drowning in either, or, even worse, in a dull grey. The swirling smoke of Robert Mapplethorpe's cigarette is just as marvelous to trace as the faintest outline of Doris Saatchi's shoulders in the gorgeous print of her portrait - let's be honest, we've all seen a version of that image in which she looked strangely decapitated by a sea of black, but not this time!

The plain framing - wooden  frames of a certain prominence - enhances the experience by subtly highlighting the element of symmetry, of lines and forms in Mapplethorpe's work; without taking over or fortifying the rigid nature of the square format which feels lofty, but not restricting here.

Doris Saatchi, 1983

It is by no means a perfect exhibition. The Tate Artist Rooms initiative is aiming to engage new audience with the works of individual artists and consequently, learning and education take priority. Education toolkits are provided on the Arts Centre website and on location, not only providing socio-cultural context and locating Mapplethorpe within a bigger arts history but issuing question and answer sets which are clearly not made for the general public, but explicitly for (young) students. It is presumably owed to this objective that what appears to be a comprehensive retrospective at first is actually missing all of Mapplethorpe's more provocative work, addressing the S&M scene and gay emancipation. Thus it eradicates some of the most pivotal, political work of Mapplethorpe, work which lifts him above being a mere chronicler of his time; and it is also a key element of his own biography missing in a display which claims to be following his life by its set-up. 

Ironically, the S&M part is, albeit swiftly, mentioned in the education kit - so when one leaves the exhibition, having loved the beautiful prints and cherished the feeling of being amongst pop culture giants for a good afternoon, one is left with the mental image of a ten year old, stumbling across two curious letters during his arts homework, innocently typing them into Google... just imagine his eyes. Imagine that boy's eyes.

Andy Warhol, 1983

PS: I actually like Taylor Swift (sometimes), and I don't dress exclusively in black (don't call me Doris). But you get the picture.

All images taken from the Tate/National Galleries of Scotland.

Interview: Avram Finkelstein

“If the you and I’s of this world don’t have this conversation and it doesn’t lead to other sets of thoughts...”

It is towards the beginning of this interview that Avram Finkelstein, in his therapeutic geniality, elicits a confession from me: the confession of my frustration. The frustration about the political passiveness of the larger part of my generation, born from the relentless grinding of consumerism; the feeling that collective effort is not really something that seduces many of my peers in any way; the vexation of being cut off from the political effort and achievements of our elders. 

It is no helpful attitude, I am aware, and certainly not a great conversation starter. But Avram waves it aside with a confident insistence: “You may feel balkanised, you may feel like you live in a world in which collaboration is more difficult than ever, you may feel you live in a world in which social spaces are harder to activate but as somebody – I’m 63 – who has lived in many worlds, I feel it’s actually easier in a way. We’re just told that it’s harder. The trick is to not listen. To not listen to that.”

We talk via Skype, and while I am sat in my dark, spare South Welsh living room by a cup of tea, it seems to be sunny on the US east coast. Behind Avram, huge bookshelves tower over him in the bright light, their centre adorned by a Chinese communist poster. Once I can hear a foreign police siren, as if straight out of a Hollywood movie, blaring in the background. Avram seems worlds away from me; but as we talk he draws me in. 

We discuss his work in collectives, from the 1980’s AIDS activism flagship Silence=Death to his recent Flash Collective initiative. He considers the necessity and rewards of interacting with public spaces, and visual and performance art produced within the paradigm of political resistance. We argue the role of the individual in a collective, and today’s problematic historiography of HIV/AIDS. And as we speak, Avram never fails to give me a sense of, ‘You and I, we’re in this together.’ He is eager to hear me out, emphasising the value of our exchange. 

“We share an intergenerational responsibility that goes both ways: For young people to listen – you know, everyone’s back goes up because the assumption is, those old-timers who will tell you how it was and you need to listen. That’s not actually true. We need to listen, to all of the questions, all of the holes in the story so we can help a younger generation understanding all of its complexity while we’re both still here.”

“It’s my thing.”

He laughs when I wonder whether he might be fed up talking about collective cultural production, after all those years. “My entire life is dedicated to thinking about collectivity from a political and grassroots organising perspective, and cultural production. No, it’s my thing. I’m not sick of it. I have a lot to say about it.” He has always worked in collectives. The child of two communist parents, he appreciates the unifying and empowering potential of this strategy: “We’re told that there are intersectional tensions that are insurmountable because capitalism depends on our being balkanised. And any collective endeavour is an attempt to pierce through that.” An endeavour, he is quick to add, that is literally open to everyone who dares it, as long as they leave their ego at the door. 

“Individual identity can sometimes be somewhat antithetical, or emphasising individual identity can sometimes be antithetical to collectivity because the collective experience is really surrendering yourself to the other people in the room. Collectives are organisms, each one is different, each day that organism is different. I feel collaborative thinking is giving, learning when to trust enough to give in to the collective and that is something a lot of people find hard to do, but I don’t think it’s generational.”

Learning processes are essential to him, and if anything, his 63 years seem to be encouraging him. Recently it has been the concept of performativity - “everyone I know currently is in performance!” - that has helped him shine a new light on his work, and approach it from a different angle, and he seems to be enjoying it immensely. His pedagogical initiative, the Flash Collective, enables him not only to pass on resistance strategies to new audiences – varying profoundly in age and profession, from activists to academics – but to discover new ideas, learning new strategies himself from his collaborators. 

“I’ve come to realise the performative nature of the work that I used to consider visual cultural production. So I’ve actually spent time thinking about what performance is and the importance of performance in particular, the ways in which public spaces are performative. So I feel like I have learned more from younger artists than I have from my own peers who have settled ideas about cultural production that are somewhat crystallised.”

“The history of AIDS hasn’t begun to be written yet. But we’re pretending that it is.”

It is this crystallisation, the stagnation, that clearly bothers him. For years, he has been openly critical of what he calls 'AIDS 2.0', the “re-imagining of this historical moment that shuts out the potential for current and future activism”. It is a complacent, and somewhat lazy gaze back on the events of the 1980s and 1990s, pursued by stories such as told in the Academy Awards contender How To Survive A Plague. We’re witnessing over-simplifying, marginalising, misinterpreting attempts to press diverse, complex histories into one glorified historiography, written to suit the taste of late-stage capitalism. Its tale of heroes, complete with “beginning, middle, and end” has a finality to it, a deceptive conclusiveness to which Avram strongly opposes – not alone because it affects one of his most famous works, the ubiquitous Silence=Death poster.

“I think something like Silence=Death is a very funny case study. It’s a cardboard cutout that represents an entire generation of activists, queer activism, AIDS activism. It’s come through the mechanisms of late stage capitalism, it’s come to represent a whole series of ideas.”

The Silence=Death project was founded in 1985 by Avram, Jorge Soccaras, Oliver Johnston, Chris Lione, Brian Howard, and Charles Kreloff, as a consciousness-raising project based on popular feminist models. The six men – three of which previously hadn’t known each other – soon found each other continually debating the politics of HIV/AIDS. Eventually the idea of making a poster was brought forward by Avram, who had gained his political education in the anti-war movement and Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign. The result, with its eminent pink triangle and stark white letters, predated ACT UP by two weeks. Yet it became its most popular embodiment.

“The poster went up literally just two weeks before ACT UP formed. So in the AIDS historiography the story goes that Silence = Death is the ACT UP logo and it represents an entire generation of activism and a whole series of questions. But in fact it was created by six individuals, three of whom didn’t know each other … it was six people who designed that poster. It activated public spaces and it was ACT UP who was responsible for that.”

Avram is keen on pointing out that the Silence=Death poster couldn’t have existed as a product of any other collective. It is the brainchild of six individuals, not of an entire generation: a circumstance that has been neglected countless times, in the effort to smooth it into the predominant, institutionalised narrative. It is a superficial reading, erasing voices left, right and centre: “Communities are made of individuals and I’ve been writing about this in reference to the question of an AIDS historiography – the intersectionality; this very interesting kind of crosshatching of multiple generations with HIV-positive gay men.”

There are stories to be told, viewpoints to be opened. “The history of AIDS hasn’t begun to be written yet. But we’re pretending that it is.” If you ask Avram, he knows where he would start. His voice becomes excited:

“The How To Survive A Plague construction completely obliterates this parallel story that affects over half of the people in the world infected with HIV which has to do with the fact that up until 1991 they weren’t doing any surveillance on women with AIDS. And How To Survive A Plague doesn’t even touch on that. It’s a pretty interesting story: It took hundreds of activists years to get the CDC to redefine, to include manifestations of immunosuppression in women in the definition of AIDS. If I were an activist in 2070, I would want to hear that story, wouldn’t you?”

“I want to create a space for the replacement for the Silence = Death poster.”

“The whole idea of the flash collectives is: I want to create a space for the replacement for the Silence=Death poster.” 

It sounds crass, the way he bluntly throws this statement into our conversation. It breaks with the veneration we all share for that poster, the firm belief that, yes, this poster deserves its place in the museums. But let the words sink in, and they start to make sense, you can sense where Avram is coming from. Isn’t he proud of what the collective achieved, doesn’t he want it to go on? “I end up spending more time speaking against my own work ... because it’s like a doppelgänger, it’s like it’s trotted out to represent a whole set of things, but it’s a set of things that are so deeply institutional and totally ignore a whole other set of things.”

Avram is ready to move on, and he has found a way to return to the nitty-gritty of the Silence=Death Project, without falling for the glory-laden fantasy that the poster has come to represent. His Flash Collective initiative seeks to engage new audiences and activate public spaces by steering away from canonical cultural production, and by employing non-hierarchical, collective strategies in order to reframe social questions surrounding HIV/AIDS, gender, reproductive justice, and only recently, the refugee crisis.

“I want us to figure out what it means and set up whole new set of conversations so that the critiques that brought that poster into being will always be alive, that’s the point of the poster. The point of the poster is resistance. And those are the skills we need to make sure are always alive. That’s what the Flash Collective experiment is about, it’s trying to learn new strategies to make new work.”

Returning to his grassroots origins, Avram now challenges himself and others by forming collectives for only a couple of hours. In the limited time, Tumblr blogs are created and interventions in the public sphere are staged; each collective approaches a subject differently, and Avram is experimenting with “which arrows to draw out of your quiver that are going to be right for that room full of people at that moment”, because there are “a million strategies for collective cultural production”. Restricting the time window is only one of those strategies, but arguably one of the more effective, as he explains:

“The reason why I have experimented with the idea of condensed time frames is to remove a lot of the obstacles that we place in our own way when it comes to complex messages. We’re sort of led to believe that some things are too hard to talk about or too hard to understand and consequently we don’t ever attempt to, but I feel like saying something about social issues is more important than saying nothing. So the condensed time frame is a way of forcing people to going on the record.”

It opens the room to dialogue. A dialogue between the people in the collective – which, as Avram admits, can easily be subject to some tension between the participants –, and a dialogue with the space. When a Flash Collective was invited to contribute to Pawel Althamer’s Draftsmen’s Congress by drawing on the walls of a museum, they decided to challenge the brief. What does it mean to be invited into an established, mediated space like Manhattan’s New Museum, and is it really as egalitarian as it sounds? After all, which audience would behold the spectacle? They ended up producing stickers, claiming ‘This is not a safe space to be queer’, for the museum-goers to take and use. The pockets with the stickers were soon removed by the museum, but as Avram writes on his website, “the stickers are still visible on the streets of New York”. 

“It’s about the ways to articulate complex things.”

The public becomes the pivotal ground for dialogue, a paradigm that the collectives are maintaining since the Silence=Death days. And the dialogue could not be carried without a language. To Avram, the key that opens the door to the public is the familiar, sometimes provocative, sometimes humorous parlance of advertising.

“I feel like advertising vernaculars pose as declaratives but I feel like public spaces are interrogatives. And the key to understanding how to break through or to pierce through complicated subjects is understanding which questions to ask or reading responses as interrogatives. I feel like even when we’re in a public space and we’re saying something incredibly declarative, like to use a Gran Fury thing, “Kissing doesn’t kill: greed and indifference do”, we’re activating that space in the hope of a response, so in fact, what appears to be declarative is a dialogue. And I think it’s really essential to think any work in the public sphere as a dialogue and paying attention to the responses however they’re gaged.”

It makes a full circle, this strategy, twisting something that could not be more consonant with capitalism and consumerism to your own political ends. “[It is] a dynamic practice that is really about resistance strategies...it’s about the ways to articulate complex things.”

Avram cherishes his flash collectives because it is a way to pass this practice, his knowledge and experience of many years, on to the next generation, and make his voice heard without obliterating others. He is aware that time is precious. 

“You have this very limited period of time where people who were actually there in the beginning are still alive and young people who are completely versed in the complexity of historiography, archives, archival practices and intersectionality and are thinking about all that stuff, they are both alive at the exact same moment and that’s not going to be true forever. So I feel like we share an intergenerational responsibility and this goes back to the collectives.” Again, he calls on the duty of his peers. “It’s sacred ground for us. We lost a lot of people. But that doesn’t mean it’s over. We’re responsible to those people, to help critique the story, right?”

There it is again, this flicker, this ‘we’re in this together’ moment. It feels like he reaches out a hand through the screen. I can only imagine what it must be like to work in a collective with him, to be inspired to come up with something exciting in only a couple of hours, to thrust yourself in the transformative experience of collaboration. It sounds really easy and not scary, not frustrating at all. Let’s sit, and talk, and listen, really listen, and work. 

Avram pauses. In the past hour we sat, I drank a cup of tea, he ran to the bookshelf to find Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto for me, we chatted, we laughed. Now he is serious, almost weary.

“If the you and I’s of this world don’t have this conversations … We’re going to be gone and I don’t want someone else after we’re gone to say ‘this is what it meant’.”


All images provided by Avram Finkelstein.

The Photograph: Rudolf Nureyev

Rudolf Nureyev in La Bayadère, Palais Garnier 1974.
Image by André Chino.

The image shows Rudolf Nureyev, the dancer, the lover, the bon viveur: A lone bright figure on a dark Paris stage, his costume as radiant as his face. The performance that night is La Bayadère, Marius Petipa's romantic and exotic classic. 

Having only recently discovered the vast and omnifarious world of ballet for myself - don't worry, I'd rather watch than try the steps myself - I am drawn into the tales behind the perfect little pliés. And, oh my, is the name Rudolf Nureyev rich with stories. Take this image: It's one of those blissful moments in which life imitates (or should I say: is preceded by) art.

Nureyev certainly was the shining figure he presents in the picture. In his androgyny and intensity he quickly became a blazing star once he had escaped the bonds of the Soviet Union. Julie Kavanagh and Joan Acocella describe in detail how he, in his love for tights and self-presentation, set new standards for male ballet dancing.

But there's more to this image than, well, a pretty confident guy in dazzling white tights on a black stage. I was thrilled to learn that the scene depicted is La Bayadère's The Kingdom of the Shades, an opium-driven, hypnotic hallucination of a ballet. Arlene Croce of The New Yorker once outlined its substance beautifully:

"The subject of the Kingdom of the Shades is not really death, although everyone in it except for the hero is dead. It's Elysian bliss, and its subject is eternity ... [it is] a poem about dancing and memory and time."

The scene's theme echoes hauntingly in Nureyevs life. If his life, his world weren't created by hallucinatory drugs, they certainly were shaped by excess, by numerous lovers hidden in the shadows, by a relentless pursuit of fame. And in retrospect one can feel time pressing upon Nureyev - he must have felt it himself, dancing up into his 40s, unwilling to leave the limelight, half-joking about his "old galoshes". The stage, the dancing kept him alive as long as they could, as if to Nureyev death never really mattered - only the eternity in which his name, his work would be remembered. In 1992, shortly before his AIDS death, he, sick and struggling, staged his last ballet on a Paris stage: La Bayadère. 

This is the third installment of 'The Photograph', a series of pictures that I love, find remarkable or important, and which I will present on this blog on a non-regular basis.

Gustav Hofer and Luca Ragazzi: Suddenly, Last Winter

Suddenly, Last Winter is a documentary film made in 2007, when the Italian journalists and long-time couple Gustav Hofer and Luca Ragazzi found themselves confronted with a violent wave of homophobia. The violence flared when civil partnerships for homosexuals were firstly proposed to the Italian parliament, and while Gustav and Luca were understandably excited about the development, Christian and conservative parties and movements braced themselves against it, leaving the country politically unstable and its people in fear and anger.

The premise is a simple one: On Gustav's initiative, the couple hits the streets, attends protests and endures numerous, endless conferences of the senate to understand the dispute. They try to interview as many people as possible, politicians, civil movement leaders and seemingly innocent passer-bys. And they never shy away from directing the camera at themselves: their disappointed faces, the fear in Luca's voice after being threatened by fascist demonstrators. By continually asking the right questions in the right moments, they subtly deconstruct the arguments of the self-called "defenders of the family and traditional values" and reveal their weak spots. When talking to politicians, more often than not, hypocrisy and a dangerous entanglement between the purportedly secular state and clerical influences come to light. When interviewing the religious, they find unreasonable fear, ignorance and hate. "I don't know what you're afraid of!", Gustav shouts in one particularly intense debate. "They say the same things, like broken records, the poor things", Luca will reply soon, exhausted by the empty phrases.

Luca and Gustav watching the news.

What makes the film so successful is not its immediacy - the hand-held camera in midst of the demonstration - or its makers' perseverance. Suddenly, Last Winter is a very personal film, and that's what makes it special. Luca and Gustav open their doors and their lives to the viewer, thereby making visible what their political opponents would love to hide forever. "We were never good at hiding", they admit at the beginning of the film, and they are right. They've staged scenes with themselves watching or reading the news, recapping their legal situation in bed and cycling past posters advertising the highly contrived "Family Day 2007". With a wink they'll comment on their own bad acting - after all, this is how they are, it's a film about what they feel. Sometimes it's subtle self-deprecation, sometimes honest outrage and fear, and the mixture makes Suddenly, Last Winter a worthwhile watch.

Zanele Muholi in Weltbilder 5, Zürich

To refresh my mind after the long break, and get my thoughts back on track, I went to Switzerland. In the Helmhaus in Zürich's city centre, I visited a carefully conceived and curated exhibition called Welt - Bilder 5. Welt - Bilder (World Images) is an ongoing exhibition series which asks and answers questions about the way people live, move and conform in different parts of the world and cultures. This year, it featured artists such as Bieke Depoorter, Naoya Hatakeyama and Tobias Zielony.

The poster, featuring an image from Zielony's Trona series

My favourite part has to be - easy to tell regarding the content of this blog and this earlier blog post - Zanele Muholi's Faces and Phases. It includes simple portraits of queer South Africans, each completed with a name and place. I described this series as powerful and poignant back when I had seen it on the internet. I dare say that Muholi's images work even better in print.

Muholi's work had a room for itself in the spacious Helmhaus, well lit and without windows or noises, making it possible to immerse into the pictures and get caught up in them without distraction. The portraits are hung on eye height, and because Muholi's subjects looked right into the camera, it feels, when looking at the prints, as if the people are staring right back at you. The faces are printed close to lifesize, and when I looked at one of them, I felt a downright conversation between me and the person taking place.
The Welt - Bilder 5 hand-out describes the work as "scintillating diversity (...) These images of the lesbian, transgender and gay scene bear witness to a healthy sense of self on a continent where traditional gender roles are strongly upheld". Having been transported thousands of miles to the slightly less conservative Switzerland and a mainly white audience, the images, in the way they were displayed, are still strong and proud ambassadors. They question prejudice, fear, invisibility, and they do it in the most direct way possible except for the people actually speaking to you in person.
I am really happy I managed to see Faces and Phases exhibited this way, and hope that the prints become available to an even larger audience in the future. The series is also included in the book Welt - Bilder 5, accompanied by background information texts. The book is published by Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nürnberg.

The Photograph: Richard Avedon

Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg, poets, New York, December 30, 1963

"I wanted to combine a portrait wit a story that I wanted to tell" - Richard Avedon

"Your photo is straight that's why it's good" - Allen Ginsberg to Richard Avedon

Researching Richard Avedon's photography for my upcoming university essay, I came across this picture, taken in 1963. I instantly liked it for its simplicity and directness, and for the ease which with the close relationship between the famous beat poet Allen Ginsberg and his life partner Peter Orlovsky is being portrayed - and for the fantastic facial hair, obviously.
Ginsberg became a kind of a "pin up" for the intellectual part of the 1970s gay movement after the picture had been published on the cover of the 8/1970 issue of Evergreen Review. Avedon himself once stated that "a portrait isn't a fact, only an opinion", hence adding a second, political dimension to his pictures. He found inspiration in the changing times, and enjoyed challenging conventions by taking up provocative subject matters. He had the power to do so - by 1960 Avedon was already a wealthy, established lifestyle and fashion photographer, counted among the world's ten greatest photographers by Popular Photography. His sense for great, straightforward portraiture was infallible. This and his experience certainly enabled him to carry a political message in his pictures so subtly, so beautifully, and yet so confidently.  I can't remember Richard Avedon ever being named as one of the idols of the gay movement - it may be because of his modesty which definitely resounds in his portraits - but I think he should be.

This is the first installment of  'The Photograph', a series of pictures that I love, find remarkable or important, and which I will present on this blog on a non-regular basis.

Jennie Livingston: Paris Is Burning

Pepper Labeija in Paris Is Burning (Screenshot)

Paris Is Burning is a documentary film, directed by Jennie Livingston and published in 1990. It deals with New York's Ball culture in the late 1980s. The balls were, and are to the present day, large events where everyone, but mainly gays, lesbians, transgender, transvestites, and queer people of Afro-American and Latino origin, could have a great time "being fabulous", performing in drag or presenting extravagant dance styles.

The balls are extravagant, something for the eye to feast, giant parties, serving as well-needed upbeat moments in the film. They are so exciting, and the viewer immediately gets why the protagonists spend most of their days stealing clothes, planning outfits and performances, and organising more balls. It makes you want to go back to the wild New York of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

And then there are the quieter, pensive moments of the film. The excessive balls serve as a distraction from the often miserable life of the characters: Many of them deal with poverty, violence, homophobia and transphobia on a daily basis, prostitute themselves to make a living, or are ill with AIDS. To Livingston, they open up their dreams of gender reassignment surgery, or becoming a successful model, but also of security, wealth, a home, steady relationships - and it is these moments when you really start to relate to the protagonists.

Paris Is Burning also shows an alternative to the traditional nuclear family - many of the ball participants live in Houses, substitute families founded by and named after Ball legends which function as "mother" or "father". There are the Houses of Labeija, Xtragavanza, Ninja - united in their competition. It is heart-warming to see the love and care shared by the House members, and Livingston approaches this environment very sensitively to document the protagonists in private moments, off their outspoken Ball personas. The making of Paris Is Burning took seven years - and it is palpable. Livingston came really close to her subjects and achieved a honest insight into their lives, by conducting excellent interviews and mixing them with observed moments.

The ball culture exists still, but most of the protagonists of Paris Are Burning are gone. They died of AIDS or were murdered - Venus Xtravanza's death is one of the shock moments in the film. In this context, Paris Is Burning becomes kind of a memorial, mourning times and people long gone. But the way it celebrates life, diversity and self-expression is exemplary and highly enjoyable; a fundamental documentary to watch when you are interested in LGBTQ history.

HIV/AIDS in Photography: Nan Goldin, Albert J. Winn, Edo Zollo

Nan Goldin: Gilles' arm, 1993

"I think AIDS changed the visual arts and that art can change lives." (Albert J. Winn)

It is still a month before the World AIDS day so there's time enough to have a look at HIV/AIDS and photography. My twitter feed, my Facebook page and some other news sources have been bursting with HIV news recently - whether it was about rising infection rates in China, a new HIV strain discovered in Russia, further vaccine trials or the intriguing-looking documentary film How To Survive A Plague coming to the UK (watch the trailer below)...

....therefore I rummaged through my little photo collection and rediscovered a few of my favourite photographs on the topic. Photography has played a vital part in the fight for visibility and acceptance, and experienced a significant change with the emergence of AIDS activism.

After 1981, when the immune disease was discovered, photo journalists hit on the mysterious 'plague' with the same sense of sensation and insensitivity as the physicians and the public, where it soon became known as the 'gay plague' or 'gay-related immune deficiency'. Ill persons were portrayed as outcasts, stigmatised, victimised, singled out by cruel fate. Popular photographic methods included the prominence of visibly ill bodies, the subjects avoiding the camera's gaze, a deliberate play on harsh light and shadow - often backlighting - not unlike the way criminals are depicted. It was a brutal look cast from the outside on the 'victims', going along with the zeitgeist of the early 1980s, fueling fear and discrimination.

Nicholas Nixon: Donald Perham, Milton, N.H., December 1987

These pictures surely have their place in history. However, I prefer looking at pictures that were produced a little later - when communities started to build, and pictures were taking within the structures of support and empowerment; basically, when the gaze changed its direction, when it became the point of view from within the community.

There are wonderful examples of photographs - mainly self portraits - taken by persons with AIDS. There is the warm-hearted, outspoken project My Life Until Now by Albert J. Winn - he decided not to be defined solely by his infection and photographed himself in his environment - with his partner, in his kitchen, in front of the TV. You can play a little "I spy with my little eye..." game with his pictures, spotting all the different elements he deliberately included in his pictures to show that he has a life beyond AIDS: the Jewish candleholder, his books, his dog... very simple, but very effective. Suddenly the pictures of AIDS are not about death, but about life.

Albert J. Winn: Hanukkah 1995

There are also the pictures of people supporting their ill friends. These pictures are more occupied with death and suffering, due to their nature as testimonies of the survivors. Nevertheless they are made with so much more sympathy than any of the early photos. One of the most notorious photographers in this context is, of course, the brilliant Nan Goldin who saw her friends dying and still had her camera always with her. Her pictures immediately evoke an emotional response, the deeply personal relation between Goldin and her subjects affect the audience, even today, twenty years after Gilles' death.

Nan Goldin: Gotscho Kissing Gilles

AIDS has gone a long way, from the 'gay-related immune deficiency' to the scourge for Africa to a highly mystified STI. AIDS is not necessarily fatal anymore, but living with it is everything but easy. I think it is important to keep the awareness up, to make the disease visible - not in a Nicholas-Nixon-way, but in whatever way is appropriate and helps to end the stigma. The pioneers from the AIDS communities have paved the way. 

I will leave you with a picture from a pretty recent, committed and in-depth project by the London-based photographer Edo Zollo, Stand Tall, Get Snapped: 30 HIV+ people, which combines beautiful, positive portraits with the personal story of the photographed individual.

Edo Zollo: Anca, 29, 13 years HIV+

I think it's this dreary weather that makes me think about death (or last week's lecture). Ugh. I'll stop, for now.

Hollywood

P. Lorca diCorcia: Marilyn, 28 years old; Las Vegas, Nevada; $30

Last night I came across an interesting interview with Philip Lorca diCorcia in which he - whilst casually having a haircut - talks about his long-time photo series Hustlers. One of the moments that got stuck in my head was when he talked about the picture above, Marilyn, 28 years old; Las Vegas, Nevada; $30 [their name, age, place of origin and what diCorcia paid them].

The picture is outstanding from the rest series, as diCorcia admits, for being "fully front-up and clearly the imitation of an actress" - the latter struck me in particular. Apparently, diCorcia had no influence on Marilyn's pose, the prostitute chose it. A certain resemblance to Marilyn Monroe is undeniable. This reminded me on an article I had read earlier, an examination of Indonesian trans women living in Europe. They, too, were majorly influenced by Hollywood movies and actresses: in the way they presented themselves, in they way they imaged romances - basically, Hollywood shaped their entire lives and hopes. The Indonesian women, trying to survive in the Netherlands, seemingly share their dreams with diCorcia's Marilyn - is it, in the end, the beginning of the American Dream?

Hollywood is, inarguably, the big thing. We're being flooded with images from Hollywood every day, there's no escape. No other industry has promoted the American Dream more successfully - the idea that you can change your life, your identity, if you only believe and work hard enough; tempting particularly for those struggling with gender dysphoria, or unrequited sexuality. But what diCorcia and the story of the Indonesian women show and Hollywood conceals: Only few can make it, and the rest remains a hopeless imitation, an empty performance.

Phil Bicker sums it up perfectly in his LightBox article about Hustlers: "Masterfully depicting the bleak underside of Hollywood, they also capture the town's unfulfilled dreams and its fake intimacy." 

A. Eisenstaedt: Marilyn Monroe, 1953

Found this on little rant by @Wiscodiz on Twitter just now: "Fuck the American Dream. Its a white cishet capitalist dream. Its a nightmare for poc, trans/queer folks, the poor, and the disabled." I am not sure whether Marilyn Monroe would approve, but for me, it's true.

Brassaï, Lulu and the punctum

Lulu, at Le Monocle, c. 1932

The picture above was taken by the Hungarian photographer Brassaï in an underground club in Paris in the 1930s. I came across it earlier while researching black and white night photography, and in a seminar today we've had quite an interesting discussion about it.

We talked about Lulu when we discussed Roland Barthes' theory of the punctum. The punctum, according to Barthes, is - very roughly and generally - the one element in a picture that sparks your interest and, more importantly, an emotional response; it's the one bit that really hooks you to the picture. The punctum can be a very personal thing, e.g. if you have a habit of drinking Lanson Brut champagne, the bottle in the picture above might be the one thing you will respond to immediately.

Now, what I realised today is that not only is the punctum a personal matter and your emotional response might be different from someone else's, but it can also influence your interpretation of a picture majorly. Maybe it was because I am dealing with gender in photography on a daily basis, but when I saw the picture for the first time I wasn't too fussed with the fact that Lulu presents herself in a really masculine way. My punctum was her eyes: the quite sad, introvert look into the distance. This picture makes me feel loneliness in the first place - particularly when you take the sole place setting, the single glass, the unshared bottle of champagne into consideration, too. 

However, my seminar group disagreed with me on that point. Someone took the eyes as a punctum as well, but connected their longing gaze then to Lulu's masculine appearance and the scenery of an Parisian lesbian underground club, and said that the picture was talking about sexual desire and frustration. Someone else was drawn to the mural behind Lulu - which is unfortunately not visible in this slightly cropped version, but the original version shows a part of it, and you can see female legs and high heels. All of the sudden the contrast between the female characteristics in the painting and Lulu's appearance made the picture tell of gender difference, gender expression, self identity - a pretty superficial, but nevertheless valid point, in my eyes.

I think it's pretty cool how details can change the perception of a single picture in completely opposite directions. Also I like the way it shows how personal experience feeds into your interpretation - if I wasn't used so much to seeing crossdressers and drag and genderbending, maybe my initial response wouldn't have gone beyond the gender tension in Brassaï's picture, either.

Christer Strömholm: Les Amies De Place Blanche

Jacky, place Blanche 1961

"This is a book about the quest for self-identity, about the right to live, about the right to own and control one's own body.

(...)

These are images of women - biologically born as men - that we call 'transsexuals'.

As for me, I call them 'my friends of place Blanche'. This friendship started here, in the early 60s and it still continues."

Christer Strömholm, 1983

I could have titled this blog post: "Why Les Amies De Place Blanche is my favourite photo book in the world", or "Why I am completely in love with Christer Strömholm's photos". But no - let's keep up at least the weak pretence of neutrality, shall we?
(This mere semblence of an unbiased photo book review won't last for longer than a few lines, I fear. I'm way too much in awe.)

Published in 1983, Les Amies De Place Blanche regained quite a bit of attention lately when the popular website BuzzFeed picked it up and the photos subsequently circulated on Facebook and Twitter. The book has been on my bookshelve for a while by then, and it was a lovely surprise to see the new attention to it.
The pictures are Strömholm's record of his time in Paris, when he lived in the red light district of Pigalle and became close friends with many of the trans women - some post-op, some pre-op -, the so-called 'nightbirds' who mainly earned their money by prostitution. The Swedish photographer and the girls lived on the same floor of a cheap hotel, and shared their lives in the night.

"Often, around 2 o'clock in the afternoon, I heard knocking on the wall of my room. It was Cobra, telling me coffee was ready. We had coffee with milk in her room on the 5th floor of the hotel Chappe. There were breadcrumbs in bed. We had been sleeping since dawn and it would soon be dark."

Nana, 1959

It is a lovely book, the 2011 edition printed extraordinarily well by Dewi Lewis. The pictures are of astonishing quality - beautifully lit and framed, great portraits and observed moments. But it is not the quality alone that makes the book outstanding to me. It is the story that the pictures tell.
Unlike many other projects (particularly from the last ten years, surprisingly) the subjects in Les Amies De Place Blanche are not treated as outcasts, as curious struggling individuals defined by their fleeting gender alone. They are not exploited, not photographed solely for the sake of the spectacle or a political agenda. The pictures tell the story - the title gives it away - of a deep and lasting friendship in the first place; the gender plays only a secondary role. In the 2011 book, you'll find a short introduction to all the girls and their stories, the so-called 'family album', and the personal accounts of Nana and Jacky, two of Strömholm's closest friends and favourite subjects.

Gina & Nana, place Blanche 1963

The girls in these pictures have dignity, and Strömholm treats them with respect - and because he is so close to them, he is able to look behind the facade. Just look at Jacky's upbeat personality that punches you through the frame, or Nana's subtle sadness. I feel that the trust the girls had in the photographer is tangible. A few of the pictures are snapshots of the girls joking around in their rooms, or meeting their boyfriends. Anybody could be in these pictures - I think its great that neither Christer Strömholm nor the 'nightbirds' let themselves be reduced to photographing/being trans. It is a message to all of us (attention, pathos!): Trans people are having lives that go beyond their gender, they enjoy life as much as others, they don't want to be pitied all the time. Meet them, talk to them, get to know them. Les Amies De Place Blanche serves a splendid example of how portraits are made with respectfulness and love. Given the fact that the project was made in the 1950s and 60s, it is a shame that not many photographers seem to have learned from it since.

Christer avec Panama, 1968

All pictures by Christer Strömholm.