Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015

Today, I am really happy to read that Zanele Muholi, who I have written about several times on this blog, has been nominated for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015. The judges, among them photographer Rineke Dijkstra and Chris Boot of Aperture, decided to acknowledge Muholi's work Faces and Phases (2006-2014).

Earlier this year, I went to Paris Photo where I found Faces and Phases in its most recent form, an enormous book published by Steidl.

Just chillin' at Paris Photo shelves: Faces and Phases

Although I loved the simple design and the beautiful black and white printing (straightforward-ness always strikes a chord in me) and despite my long-declared love for Muholi's work, I actually did not end up buying the book. For a simple reason: I prefer those images on a wall, in a big print, when her subjects seem to look right back at you. In gallery prints the sheer power of Faces and Phases and other works is enriched by a sense of intimacy, which the book does not quite manage to pull off. Luckily Paris Photo is a powerhouse of photography, and in one of the many corners I found Muholi on the wall, too, as represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery from NYC.

Either way, it's lovely to see her work slowly being recognised on a much lager scale. The Deutsche Börse prize is a big deal, and she's up against strong competitors like the amazing Viviane Sassen. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

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.

Rob Lebow/Masha Kupets: Gorgeous

What happens if you take popular drag culture and pimp it up with "glamour, glamour, glamour"? Photographer Rob Lebow and Creative Director Masha Kupets have tried and the result is Gorgeous, a 'coffee table photography book' aimed to be released in 2014. Gorgeous will feature several well-known US-American artists from the LGBTQ scene, or as Lebow puts it: "It will include the entire LGBTQ spectrum: androgyny, drag queens, drag kings, gender benders, trans, plus a few surprises for shock and awe", all glammed up for spectacular portrait shots, their personal stories added in text form. According to its makers, the book is an attempt to celebrate the culture, and at the same time to educate about non-binary gender expression and challenge gender norms.
The mainstream fascination with drag culture is nothing new - think of La Cage Aux Folles from the 1970s, Priscilla, The Queen of the Desert from the 1990s, or RuPaul's ever so popular Drag Race. While the gay website Queerty assumes that the topic might be "challenging or unfamiliar to a lot of people", I'd argue that most people have seen and are not too fussed with a drag queen here and there. By nature it is fun and exciting on the surface, and deep at its best and tragic at its worst underneath. It has a history - after all, the Stonewall riots in 1969 were led by transvestites and trans people - and it has its own, brilliant, successful way of answering problems such as gender dysphoria, homophobia or transphobia. But most of all, it is so outspoken, so flamboyant, such a feast for the eye and the mind alike that it deserves to be celebrated.
I believe that Lebow and Kupets do not really need the slightly superficial educational approach which they repeat in empty phrases in their interviews over and over. Gorgeous has all the potential to be, well, gorgeous the way it is. The portraits are stunning, echoing great photographers such as Richard Avedon and playing on old-school Hollywood glamour in their simplistic, straight-forward, studio style. They are celebrating the diversity indeed, by capturing the great personas of the subjects, reverberating the vibes, the pride, the playfulness in simple and always beautiful black and white.

Cake Moss 

The Kickstarter for the project just failed to raise the required funding. The Gorgeous Project is not giving up, though. I'd love to see it succeed, because these pictures are so great to look at, they deserve a bit of good paper and nice printing. Maybe a good book will actually help the matter, and promote progressive gender conceptions, just by being lovely and approachable - a little bit of iconic glamour never hurts, and if there's one thing you can say about drag artists, they never fail to stand their ground.

Ernie Omega