The Photograph: SFGH Ward 5A

Unknown photographer: Shanti counsellor Ed Wolf works with a patient. Image courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library, via shantihistory.blogspot.com

"But hand-holding is a very difficult part of medicine. I do it a lot, and I try to do it right, and it is a very satisfying as well as wrenching part of the experience." - Robert Cohen, AIDS Doctor

The picture above, showing counsellor Ed Wolf comforting an AIDS patient in 1983, is one of the few images I was able to dig up so far from the early 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic began. It is a sentimental little find, transporting the viewer to San Francisco's famous AIDS ward 5A. The ward at its time possibly offered the most prominent window into an otherwise still very secluded community. Before 1985, when Rock Hudson's death hit the ignorant society with a vengeance, social and governmental support compassed near to nothing. The gay and lesbian community found itself left alone, and responsible for the many sick people. 

The Shanti Mission was just one of many projects all over the US where volunteers from the community stepped in and helped the best they could, when the rest of the world did not bother. The seclusion surely was a self-protective reflex as well, a shield against homophobic attacks which condemned the "gay cancer" and decried homosexuality as a sinful, dangerous lifestyle. In the end, they made the community much stronger than ever expected.

The seclusion of the first years might be the reason that only a few pictures are available nowadays, most of them hidden away in archives or private family albums; photo journalism and documentary photography did not really discover AIDS until much later. A greater selection, luckily, is featured in the touching documentary film We Were Here, which also includes an extensive interview with Ed Wolf. Weirdly enough I enjoy the fact that it is so hard to get an insight into the subject: It tells me that, after all, visually witnessing something is only worth so much. To really know what it feels like to be part of a community devastated by a disease, you must have been there, at the right time, at the right place.

This is the second 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.

Stephen Reiss: Home

There's been some heated discussion in Germany recently after a columnist of the newspaper Die Welt called same-sex couples "deficient" and deemed them unable to raise children. One of the most powerful and poignant answers to this outrageous ignorance can be found in the work of photojournalist Stephen Reiss and his Home project.
Home is a beautiful, tender long-time observation made in the Bronx, NYC home of Eshey Scarborough and Paris Harris, a lesbian couple who have raised twenty foster kids in ten years - and there will be more. Reiss started the project as a student and soon found himself entangled in the extended family, carefully documenting the life in the family and the individual lives after foster care.
"We believe the service we give is the rent we pay to stay on the planet", states Eshey Scarborough in the New York Times. Many of her foster girls identify as LGBT, live with disabilities or are scarred by abuse, and would probably have never had a perspective in life, if it hadn't been for Scarborough and Harris. The pictures show the family eating together, praying, playing, celebrating birthdays. They also show the sad and lonely times: a girl crying, fears of death and isolation captured in a diary.
But when one strips away the knowledge of the unusual materialisation of this family, the Home project becomes a very 'normal' portrait of a family - including all the ups and downs, children growing up and moving on, children returning to the nurturing arms of their parents, cuddly toys, pets, huge cooking pans. There is nothing deficient about this family, on the contrary: Reiss has captured a family as wholesome as one can wish for - with a few more children than one would expect, perhaps.

Thomas Weisskopf: Cut

Thomas Weisskopf: untitled 001

Let's stick to the recent theme of portrait series mixed up with Switzerland a little longer, and introduce Thomas Weisskopf. This Swiss photographer provides the extensive series Cut, an unequivocal commentary on identity, beauty standards and orientalism. He photographed trans women and transvestites from Thailand for his portraits, in the same way continually: a simple dark blue background, the focus on the naked torsos - cut off across the chest, mostly just a hint of breasts - and on the faces, enhanced with make-up, framed by well-cared hair, the gaze often drifting into the unknown around the lens.

Weisskopf became acquainted with many of his subjects during his stays in Bangkok, and when you have a look at the index on his gallery's website, it becomes a sea of women photographed in the same way, united by fairly many attributes: the make-up, the hair, the full, sensual lips and so on. While each of the portraits shows as an individual, they become an anonymous mass, like-minded and forced into line.

The title Cut refers, of course, to the sex re-assignment surgery many of the women supposedly underwent. It can also stand for the metaphorical cut in the women's lives, the change from a outwardly male appearance to a full female identity. For Maja Peter it further indicates the way in which "illusion and reality blend in a scintillating semblance into which yearning is etched like a wound". But what is the root of this yearning, and what do these women desire? Do they, on the basis that they look, to an untrained eye, very much alike, desire the same things, or is the portrait in the end about the individual again?

Cut is certainly multi-layered. Weisskopf's subjects are exposed to the gaze of others - and there is the crux of it. As much as the series is about the quest for self-identity, it also hits on the fulfillment through others, and on the beauty standards these women pursue in order to please (and make money, presumably). It is a 'standardised femininity', achieved through facial feminisation surgery (another cut!), and make-up - prominently featured in these images. Trans women underly the struggle for beauty in a world in which beauty is defined by the patriarchal system just like most other women.

And this is where yet another layer comes to play: Who, in particular, sets these beauty standards? It is the mighty white man from the Western world - the light skin tones, the dyed hair, the accentuated big eyes hint to it. Without claiming that all of Weisskopf's subjects are prostitutes (they are not), it remains a fact that the sex industry gains Thailand up to $4 billion every year, and that the clients' wishes have subtly taken over the traditional value of feminine beauty in Thai culture.

Therefore another, and the most interesting, layer of Weisskopf's work is the commentary on the exploitative gaze on what seems exotic to the viewer. Presumably the majority of Weisskopf's audience is white and middle class - as is the author of this blog. It is exactly this audience which is establishing and re-enforcing the beauty standards Weisskopf's women follow - and which is mostly (sadly) not able to tell one Asian women apart from another. That is why one tends to get the terrible impression of uniformity when seeing too many of the Cut images at once. Peter Stohler asks the question: "How 'individually' can 'exotic' people be shown in photographs?" It is this audience which is responsible for the cut - not the literal, but the metaphorical one, the gap between self-identity and identity of the mass, self-fulfillment and the desire to please others. 

Cut is not as much about personality as, for example, Zanele Muholi's portraits. Weisskopf does not even give us the names of the women. It remains a meditation on the meaning of the individual in a uniform world with homogenous requirements. And yet, finally, Weisskopf takes us back to the individual. It is almost an invitation to look longer at one of the many singular portraits, engage with one of the women, in the helpless attempt to compensate for the negligence. 

Thomas Weisskopf: untitled 037

Panti's Noble Call

Here are ten minutes of wise words everyone should have a listen to - delivered by the Irish drag queen Panti (Rory O'Neill). Maybe she should be part of the Gorgeous project, since she's got one of the most important stories to share?!

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.

On Vacation

le monde et la mer is on mental vacation at the moment. Updates are coming very soon, once I'm back from one of my explorations into the world of the good, the bad and the ugly. Please stay tuned, and enjoy the advent season.

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