Texts | Taco Hidde Bakker

Do We Live in the Facial Expressions of Others?

You are looking out at me, but from where… from when… and why? I see your face, but do you see me? Is it really you who is looking, who was looking?

A portrait is equally of someone and by someone. And I wonder to what extent the latter fact is visible: not only in the eyes or the gaze of the sitter, but also in the characteristics of the image itself, whether in composition, texture, color palette, or otherwise.

Sometimes a name is known or has been assigned to the person portrayed; nevertheless, many a depicted person remains anonymous while their image lives on. Sometimes the portraitist is more well-known than the subject; sometimes the subject’s fame outlives that of the portraitist.

When photography burst onto the public stage around the 1840s, portraiture underwent a rapid democratization. In the craze for affordable “real-life” depictions, many people who were too poor to commission a painter or draughtsman had their portrait taken by means of the new technology. In his critical essay “Salon of 1859,” the French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire, who was skeptical about such newfangled gadgets, scorned the widespread acceptance of the medium: “A madness, an extraordinary fanaticism took possession of all these new sun-worshippers.” Baudelaire instead preferred the monsters of his own fantasy above what he deemed “trivial,” namely that which already exists, which he considered useless and tedious to depict. Yet Baudelaire also expressed admiration for the portrait in the same essay: “A portrait! What could be simpler and more complex, more obvious and more profound?” It is unclear whether Baudelaire distinguished between the painted portrait and the photographed face (and what could be simpler and more complex than the latter?).

I count the artist Alberto Giacometti among the greatest portraitists of the previous century. He was not familiar with how to use a camera, and as far as I know he never photographed a person, if he ever photographed anything at all. He analyzed a person’s face or posture with a painter’s eye and sculptor’s hand. Although he was a superb draughtsman, he always wavered and was never able to finish a portrait, only to abandon it. For Giacometti, a face meant everything – the shape or position of a nose alone could be too much.

Giacometti’s portraits, in particular his drawings and paintings, hover at the edges of the unrepresentable. During the 1920s, Giacometti had a brief affair with the Surrealist movement, but he changed his mind after its leader André Breton boldly declared that “we could do away with portraits because nowadays people know what a face is.” Giacometti responded in shock, “I don’t.”

Can a face ever be fully known? I’m sure Giacometti would have agreed with novelist Elizabeth Bowen’s memorable phrase, cited by Christian Wiman is his profound book-length essay My Bright Abyss: “To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.”

Is this why the portrait never fails to fascinate and has remained so enduring as a genre? Once your portrait is made, you are immortalized, at least in the sense that the portrait will almost surely outlive your physical being. And a photographic portrait — in contrast to a painting — inherently reflects your physical presence, capturing your natural appearance as much as possible.

Taking snapshots runs the risk of catching the subject unawares, whereas the slow sitting, a deliberate agreement between model and photographer, usually results in a portrait closer to life: closer to who you are or how you are perceived in the eyes of others. (Or do we only wish this to be true?) Walter Benjamin had this to say about slowness, in his influential essay “A Little History of Photography”(1931), reflecting on photographic incunabula from nearly a century earlier: “The procedure itself caused the subjects to live their way into, rather than out of, the moment; during the long duration of the exposure, they grew into the picture […].”

Laila Mubarak’s portraits give me the sense that her sitters have grown into her photographs, or that they are still growing into them. The portraits that display a slight discomfort leave an especially lasting impression, as if something remains unfinished, a spark that will continue kindling the relationship. Mubarak aptly labeled some of her series “work in progress,” which makes me curious as to how the portraits, including the relationship between model and photographer, will develop further.

A true portrait in a sense is always a work in progress, a lifelong – or even longer – means by which someone grows into a picture. And is a photographic portrait truer than a painted or a drawn portrait? Does the sitter grow more fully into a photographic portrait than the portraitist does? Is the sitter’s appearance merely recording itself by virtue of the camera and its operator?

In the end we are all drawn by life, and all the photographs ever taken of a person will depict some essential facets of who that person is (or must have been), even if a person’s voice and smell and gestures are absent.

Am I also looking at myself by looking at (a photograph of) your face? And you, who are looking (or looked) into the eyes or camera of the photographer: you are already eye-to-eye with everyone who will ever meet your gaze through your portrait, which retroactively becomes their portrait as well.

I want to believe that we indeed live in the eyes of others, but also in their portraits, their tales, their memories, their dreams… and thus I agree with philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who so deeply thought through the mysteries of human perception, that “I live in the facial expression of the other, as I feel him living in mine.”

On Francesca Catastini’s The Modern Spirit is Vivisective

To begin with, the remarkable title of Francesca Catastini’s debut book poses somewhat of a conundrum. Vivisection is generally understood as the practice of performing anatomical operations on (living) animals for scientific purposes. In the beginning of the modern era, dissections were performed on cadavers, usually of executed convicts, a practice considered taboo before the Renaissance. But what makes the spirit vivisective, assuming that indeed we are, or have been, modern? It might have to do with the dynamic between the whole and the part, and with the peculiar bond between anatomy and spectatorship, but Catastini’s extraordinary book is not meant to offer any conclusive answer. In the postscript, written by co-editor Federica Chiocchetti (of the image-text platform The Photocaptionist), we read that the title was taken from James Joyce’s posthumously published early novel Stephen Hero. The vivisective spirit amounts to the surgical tendency of modern literature, whose focus on its own formal qualities could be seen as a form of auto-operation.

An important figure for the study of human anatomy was the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, who taught at Padua where in 1543 he published the groundbreaking multivolume De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). The Vesalian “revolution”, writes Peter Sloterdijk in his magnum opus Spheres (1998–2004), might have been more important for the self-image of Western man than the oft-cited and misunderstood Copernican turn. The New Era (from the sixteenth century on) is marked by “making things explicit”—by, so to say, exteriorizing the hidden. Sloterdijk places the cognitive revolution sparked by the new anatomical incisions—enabling mankind to learn about its very own interior (which was convoluted before)—on equal footing with the world-shaking tremor of Ferdinand Magellan’s first sailing voyage around the globe (1519–22). In one telling collage, Catastini overlays a map of the Strait of Magellan with a picture of the fallopian tube, showing a pattern resembling the craggy coastline.

In her modest and handsome book, somewhat midway between paperback and hardcover, Catastini spins a speculative mental history of modern anatomy by way of association. She interlards a series of archival photographs, scientific illustrations, collages, and photographs of her own making with fifteen well-chosen citations, tacitly or explicitly pertaining to anatomy. Each of the five chapters ends with a calm view inside one of Europe’s early anatomical theatres, of sometimes eerily symmetrical harmony: the world’s first permanent one at Palazzo Bo in Padova (inaugurated in 1595), the Archiginnasio in Bologna, the Gustavianum in Uppsala, the Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin, and the Ospedale del Ceppo in Pistoia. Although devoid of activity, one can sense the intellectual magnitude of the scientific revolutions that once unfolded there, no less spectacular (with the cadaver as both a physical and metaphorical vanishing point) as it was instructive.

For all its serious epistemological and health achievements, Catastini playfully demonstrates some contradictions and prejudices inherent to anatomical science. In the chapter “On Looking”, for example, we find two vanitas pictures, in which death contrasts with female beauty, one allegorical frontispiece from a seventeenth-century illustrated book on anatomy, and one 1943 photograph showing an anatomy student at Johns Hopkins Medical School holding what looks like a long piece of a leg bone. Throughout the other chapters—“On Touching”, “On Canon Lust”, “On Cutting”, and “On Discovering”—there are visual puns and insightful quotations about blindness, monstrosities such as the sixth finger, and, not least of all, the gender issue and the strange misconceptions early anatomists held about the female reproductive system.

Like a consummate vivisectionist, Catastini imagined a convincing whole from so many different and disparate parts. To conclude my brief dissection, I have cut out a small part of the long quote by Francis Glisson on the inside of the cover: “The end of artificial dissection is not to mangle and cut the object it takes in hand rudely into shreds, but to gain the perfect knowledge of the same and all its parts thereby.”

Francesca Catastini: The Modern Spirit Is Vivisective
With a text by Federica Chiocchetti / AnzenbergerEdition, Vienna 2016 / 112 pages, 16 × 23 cm, 50 colour illustrations.

*This book review appeared in print in Camera Austria International No. 137 (March 2017), p. 85.

Overtones of Motion: Walking New York with Stephan Keppel

Through New York

—Yes, exactly right. Take a note of this—through New York.

—Because your work isn’t about a place. Your legs, your eyes, your camera, they pass through the place like they’re passing through a scanner.

Stephan Keppel – Exhibition view at PuntWG, Amsterdam (Fall 2015).

Walking, Scanning

Indian summer in September. We walk and walk and walk. The straight lines of Manhattan first of all, the crooked paths of Williamsburg, Brooklyn to a lesser extent. We look up and down, left and right, stop every couple of blocks or so. Stephan Keppel takes picture after picture, and I take mental notes. The pace of walking suits the city. In a few hours we’ve crossed almost half of Manhattan.

Walking with Keppel gives me an experience of New York I haven’t had before, though I took many long walks years ago, when a transatlantic photo-correspondence (a friend and I posted one photo every ten days on average, freely reacting to one another’s images) urged me to see the city with different eyes—eyes on a mission in pair with my little digital camera.

Keppel is a master stroller and keen and swift observer. His Fuji X-E1 camera, with a fixed 35mm lens, fits his way of snapping pictures. He sometimes notices remarkable situations in a split second: two men carrying a large wooden panel sideways into an entrance, or a group of men, under brisk morning sunlight, meddling with a pile of boxes, waiting to be moved into a series of lighting shops.

De stadsjutter (Rummaging the City)

The Dutch noun jutter is untranslatable. Closest to conveying its meaning would be “beachcomber”. Stadsjutter could thus be translated as “citycomber”.

The way Keppel combs and scans the appearances and movements of the city is a higher form of rummaging or foraging. Nothing to buy at a bargain, but attention drifting towards surfaces, patterns, rhythms, visual rhymes. And on the horizon looms a New York turned into rasters, grids, lines. A city of paper and ink.

Meaningful superficiality of impressions.

Stephan Keppel – Exhibition view at PuntWG, Amsterdam (Fall 2015).

Outside In

In this great city of human-built stalactites, dilapidated bricks and mortar, aggressive mirror glass high-rises, magnificent bridges, muggy metro stations, and millions of human souls going about their daily business, one can feel at home straight away and at the same time feel like a perennial outsider.

Bridges, Underground

We ride the J train, slowly sliding into Manhattan, down the red-painted Williamsburg Bridge. This bridge features phenomenally in the final scenes of the 1948 film noir “The Naked City” by Jules Dassin, where the wanted murderer Willie Garza is on the run from the police. At the end of the chase, he climbs one of the bridge’s towers from which he falls to his death.

Just before the train carries us into the underworld, conglomerates of post-war housing projects on both sides emerge. Endless rows of bricks, story upon story, tiny window frames and air conditioners multiplied by the thousands.

And so

of cities you bespeak

subways, rivered under streets

and rivers. … In the car

the overtone of motion

underground, the monotone

of motion is the sound

of other faces, also underground—*

[*Stanza taken from Hart Crane, “The Tunnel”, in Elizabeth Schmidt (ed.), Poems of New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. 59.]

Camera Austria International, No. 133 (Spring 2016), pp. 50-51.

The City as Book

The cliché goes that everything is bound to end up as a story, a movie, a book. Nowadays, for sure, everything flows into pictures. And New York is perhaps the most photographed city in the world. It is also very inviting to photography, with its lines, grids, patterns, the generally vivid light, but of sufficient diffusion. Not to forget the rough beauty of its elegant and sturdy bridges.

Life in New York City and its boroughs has inspired the publication of many great (photo)books, ranging from Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), a passionate charge against the poverty of slum life; Helen Levitt’s magical world of children playing in the streets and empty lots of Harlem in A Way of Seeing (1965); William Klein’s frantic Life is Good & Good for You in New York (1956); and Ken Schles’s Invisible City (1988), a moving portrait of the partying underbelly of the rowdy East Village of the 1980s.

But if there’s any image book on the Capital of the Twentieth Century that comes close to Keppel’s way of observing and processing the constructed and weather-beaten surfaces of a city, it’s the relatively unknown New York, New York (1972) by the Hungarian György Lőrinczy. A love song to Manhattan in gritty high contrast.

Front cover of György Lörinczy’s New York, New York (1972).

The City as Text

“The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines”, wrote E. B. White in his famous essay Here is New York (1949).* The city is not only written about; the city writes itself. So vast and various, so dense, that it can never be read by one person alone.

Keppel prints images like one would print text. He converts image files into bitmap. “It opens up the texture”, he says, “and makes the images more graphical, avoiding the all too photographic”. The black ink powder of his laser printer burns deep into glossy, Chromolux paper—paradoxically creating a matte surface.

Text, subtext, metatext, intertext, texture. Text analyses and synthesises, evokes and describes. Architectural surfaces are tightly woven interfaces: to be read, interpreted, understood, or creatively misunderstood.

The city speaks history in four dimensions.

[*E. B. White, Here is New York (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), p. 21.]

Stephan Keppel – Installation view at Quickscan NL#02, Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam (2016). Photo by Jan Adriaans and Job Janssen.

New York before New York

Keppel had not been to New York City before September 2015. But he got thoroughly acquainted and appropriated imagery before the city welcomed his physical presence. I took him to the library at the Fotomuseum Antwerp, where we browsed through piles of books and magazines, containing photos by well-known gods from the pantheon of photography as well as the forgotten ones.

A cinematic journey to the city brought us to the early 1900s, seeing fleeting images of the first skyscrapers built, and steamships going down the East River. And on to William Klein’s mesmerizing “Broadway by Light” (1958), Raymond Depardon’s slow glide into midtown, along the Roosevelt Island aerial tramway, at sunset, “New York, N.Y.” (1986), and finally, Jem Cohen’s film essay “Lost Book Found” (1996), an elusive but fascinating Benjaminian meditation on life and things in the metropolis.

Then, Keppel flew to Montréal early September for research in the archives of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), which houses many images of New York City (and, surprisingly, Montréal itself has often stood in for New York City in movies). Here he made acquaintance with, among others, the New York of Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Gordon Matta-Clark, and the Anarchitecture group.

Finally, the train ride from Canada down to New York State, along the Hudson, eventually coming to a standstill at Grand Central Station, the railway cathedral orphaned in that most suffocating and lifeless part of the city: midtown.

A first night in Queens, a first scanning of the physical space in which Keppel found himself. He captured the elegant cornice moldings, decorating the four corners of his room.

Camera Austria International, No. 133 (Spring 2016), pp. 54-55.

New York Is Nothing Like Paris

René Daniëls, a Dutch painter admired by both Stephan and me, spent a year in residency in New York in the 1980s, shortly after the heydays of punk, no wave, and “No New York”. In the 1970s, Daniëls had painted such objects as books, film cameras, and phonograph records—everyday objects but (potential) carriers of stories, history, ephemeral appearances, and, most importantly, music.

In the early 1980s, Daniëls produced a series of drawings and paintings called “Historia Mysteria”, in which the Brooklyn Bridge in New York seems to run into the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, connecting the old centre of the art world with the new global centre of art. (Or does the new centre fly away from the old, into the light of the future?)

Paris formed the scene for Keppel’s dreamlike city symphony Entre Entree (2014), more specifically, its areas neighbouring the Boulevard Périphérique.

In Paris, he meandered in circles; in New York, he walked in squares and lines.

New York is nothing like Paris.*

E. B. White was right.

[*The full sentence reads: “New York is nothing like Paris; it is nothing like London; and it is not Spokane multiplied by sixty, or Detroit multiplied by four.”, in Here is New York, p. 22.]

René Daniëls, Historia Mysteria (1981-1982). Oil on canvas, 160x240cm. Courtesy Instituut Collectie Nederland.

Second-Hand Spaces

Nowhere else can one visually scan the spatial decor of the city as condensed as in a store for used building materials. In two gigantic warehouses, called Big Reuse (formerly “Build It Green! NYC”), fragments of the discarded city are stacked, in continuous flux, on endless piles, and in countless rows.

The facades of dreams dreamt, waiting to be placed back onto the shelf of life.

Has New York Grown Old?

In “An Urban Convalescence”, a poem by James Merrill, I read:

As usual in New York, everything is torn down

Before you have had time to care for it.

Head bowed, at the shrine of noise, let me try to recall

What building stood here. Was there a building at all?*

Although Merrill had lived on the block he writes about for a decade, he barely even noticed change. But what is left to grow old, ages beautifully. “New York is the perfect city of wear”, says Keppel. The wear and tear of buildings resonate with his use of worn-out printers.

Notwithstanding the fact that Keppel’s New York City is devoid of human figures, its emptiness and decay feels humane, all too humane.

[*From James Merrill, “An urban convalescence”, in Elizabeth Schmidt (ed.), Poems of New York, p. 113.]

Stephan Keppel in NYC, Sept. 2015. Photo by Taco Hidde Bakker.

This collection of miniature essays appeared in print, including eight large photos by Keppel and accompanied by a German translation, in Camera Austria International No. 133 (Spring 2016), pp. 47-58.

Stephan Keppel’s New York-book Flat Finish (2017) is available at Fw:Books

The Uneasy Realisation of a Model. On Tom Callemin

In 2014 Tom Callemin published a book with the publisher Art Paper Editions, its cover plainly listing the titles of the twelve photographs it contains. All twelve are literally dark images, with pitch-black backgrounds from which emerge peoples and objects: Man with child, Two trees, Cage, Chapel, Room, House. The final title of the series, The performance, is descriptive on a less tautological level: a blond-haired girl with her eyes closed, her elbows being grabbed by the hands of a girl in the penumbra behind her. Everybody and everything in Callemin’s powerful photographs is enclosed, à huis clos in that beautiful French expression, by a darkness that is as inviting as it is disquieting in its theatrical isolation. Callemin says that he creates meaning by omission, by letting go of a detailed background. He finds a theatrical setting and and an ’empty’ background to be of crucial importance, as it opens ‘a reservoir of meaning’.

All the portraits Callemin makes, whether shooting still or moving images, are made inside, in a measured setting. Events underlying images don’t interest him so much, but rather the iconicity that certain images obtain by lingering on in our minds and memories. “When I’m fascinated by a photograph, I often encounter multiple images of similar situations shortly after. These images then melt into one, for which I make sketches as a model of an image I want to make.” Such an image may still have hints of the iconic, but minute changes in the way Callemin creates these photographs may result in enormous changes in how such an image will be read. “These are the balancing acts I perform. It’s about how much you, as photographer, want to show.”

The act of photography is performance in the work of Callemin, whether he works with people, animals or objects. Callemin’s own role is also brought into play, to an extent that the viewer of his work will be confronted with his own role vis-à-vis the model, but also the artist in whose place he has come to stand. “With photography a viewer in a certain way comes to replace the apparatus.” Furthermore, Callemin hopes that his careful and attractive compositions will create an experience within the viewer, but within that experience also a capsizing towards something more unsettling, perhaps through identification with the unease of the models, who usually are put to the test when collaborating with Callemin on the realisation of a photograph.

“I like to throw my models off balance,” says Callemin, “and search for something that otherwise wouldn’t come to the fore. A modelling session should be an intense experience demanding the utmost concentration from model and photographer alike.” This is akin to how filmmakers like Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson treated the actors they worked with and what they expected from them. During the filming of what later became his influential silent movie The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Dreyer was pushing his lead actress repeatedly to her knees for her to arrive at a more credible performance.

“How far may I go as a director of my photographs?” Callemin wonders and immediately responds to his own question: “Quite far, I think.” This may lead a viewer to being in disagreement with the photographer’s position, but because Callemin took that standpoint as the photographer, “the viewer of that image sees exactly what I saw and becomes a model too, in a certain way, a role he is invited to reflect upon.” But Callemin’s own role isn’t that well-defined either, it’s as insecure as the roles of the models and the audience. “One creates one’s own character, like the photographer who wants to show something different than the obvious. Therefore one needs to push through limits sometimes.”

Callemin says to seek ‘credibility through aesthetics’. What kind of lighting must he use to find that zone in which fiction enters the stage? “It all has to do with the nuances of careful lighting and I find it really exciting to create ambiguity that way.” How then, I wonder, do the plain titles relate to that ambiguity? When it comes to the use of text, Callemin wants to be as neutral as possible, avoiding the addition of new layers to the work. “I want to do a minimal suggestion, but I’m also interested in the hidden symbolism of the titles, for example House also comes to symbolise the generic notion of a house. It gains wider meaning through such dry naming, offering the viewer a screen for his own interpretation.”

The few photographs finally shown result from meticulous preparations and dozens, sometimes even hundreds of failed takes. “I attach so many conditions that it becomes almost impossible to realise a photograph as I had imagined it beforehand. It’s incredibly important that an image comes into being exactly as it should be and I sometimes go to great lengths, including detailed replicas of situations built in my studio, to arrive at that precise image. But in the end each image may prove to be a failure.”

This text was first published, in a slightly different version, in Foam Magazine #42 (Talent issue, 2015), pp. 255-256.

In between entering: a photo/graphic periphery of Paris. On Stephan Keppel’s ‘Entre Entree’ (Fw:Books, 2014)

There is a lot of doubling going on in Stephan Keppel’s 2014 photobook Entre Entree, beginning with its idiosyncratic title. Keppel took it from an entrance sign to a Parisian supermarket that said ‘entree’ (entrance) twice, but the last e of the first ‘entre/’ was erased.

Entre Entree results from a succession of two residencies, six months at Atelier Holsboer, close to the hustle and bustle of stereotypical Paris, and another half year at the former Parisian home of Dutch avant-garde artist Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931), in Meudon Val Fleury in the southern periphery of the French metropolis. A short sequence in the book shows a recording of a performance inspired by Van Doesburg’s concept of the ‘dynamic diagonal’: a long stick falling down from a pedestal towards the residential bungalow.

Keppel meandered through Paris’s spacious, anonymous outskirts, as well as his own studio, aiming his camera at doors, stairways, found objects, neon tubes, printers, façades of a variety of modernist high-rises flats, veins in marble, and scattered exotic planting. Keppel then reworked most of the black-and-white pictures—scanning, printing and reprinting them multiple times, thereby experimenting with contrast, color inversion, toners, inks, (halftone) screens and paper quality. Some of the more graphical images are all about line, texture and form.

The Human Snapshot

Thomas Keenan and Tirdad Zolghadr (eds.): The Human Snapshot (2013)

Universal aspirations never cease to exist. It is as if we were condemned to universality, especially so since the photographic view of planet Earth from outside its biosphere was published. The networked society of wireless communication, in which many of us live today, brings together “our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned”.1 Note the use of the possessive pronoun “our”, which already implies an understanding of the sphere that “we” inhabit as a shared property.

Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life

International Center of Photography, New York City, 14. 9. 2012 – 6. 1. 2013

In anticipation of the publication of my review of Huis Marseille’s exhibition Apartheid & After – to be published in Camera Austria International No. 126 (June 2014) – I’m finally publishing here my review of Okwui Enwezor’s ambitious show at ICP in the fall of 2012.

Two important concepts in present-day anthropology are agency and voice, designating oppressed or marginalised people’s own views and understanding of their lives, rather than authorities speaking for them. While these concepts usually imply the written or spoken word, it is interesting to ask to what extent the mere act of being photographed is capable of giving subjects their own voice and agency. Ariella Azoulay, today’s foremost theorist of intricacies of photography in contexts of extreme political repression, wrote in The Civil Contract of Photography (2008) that people in disaster zones can make “emergency claims” by cooperating in the act of photography, thereby joining “the citizenry of photography” (where ultimately no sovereign power exists), simply by consciously staring back at the photographer. Yet much of the interpretation and reading of photographs showing people in conflict zones is guided by how these images are framed, captioned, and published—events these subjects usually have no say in.

Re: view – Center for Historical Reenactments: After-after Tears

Museum as Hub – New Museum, New York City, 22.5. – 7.7.2013

The South African artist collective Center for Historical Reenactments (CHR) went back to being an entity they never were. After “staging” an “institutional suicide” in December 2012, they were able to hauntingly reconsider their previous two years of existence and venture into an unknown future as well. “Death” was not an end but an afterlife that quickly resulted in a reincarnation in the shape of an exhibition in New York City. “After-after Tears”, in reference to after-funeral gatherings in South Africa’s post-apartheid townships, is modelled after these events in an open sense. By going beyond the after-after, the post-event constitutes a repetition for a potential next kamikaze. Then there is the twofold meaning of the hyphenated afters: being late (in time) and as (free) adaptation from an original form, or modelling after. CHR spirals like a double helix into open pasts, while their actions and performances are like rehearsals for future historical events. Its attitude is one of re-questioning questions that, in Gabi Ngcobo’s words, “perhaps have been asked before, but we repose them to see if the current situation produces new answers, or new ways to pose [these] questions”.

Photographic Night Songs in Los Angeles

On the L.A. subculture portraits of Monica Nouwens.

Pessimists have been saying —especially since the fall of 2008— that we are witnessing the decline and fall of the American Empire (or the West in general). But whatever one may think of the current “crisis”, there is always room for optimism and creativity. One of the sunnier sides of economic catastrophe is that social interactions can develop some humanity outside of typical business conversation. Bicycles and public transportation may become popular again for cities that have bathed in gasoline for decades. “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles”, begins Brett Easton Ellis’ debut novel, Less Than Zero.[1] There might come a time in which people are afraid to use freeways altogether. They will free themselves from the concrete serpent, by choice or by force.

“Dragons of light in the dark
sweep going both ways
in the night city belly.” [2]

Monica Nouwens, a Dutch expatriate living in Los Angeles, makes photographic portraits of people living in the margins, in a parallel Los Angeles (under)world.[3] Mostly young people and mostly at night: in run-down bars, clubs, or at makeshift food pantries. Appearing in her gentle and dreamy photographs are Whites, Blacks, Asians, Latinos, American Indians[4] and everyone in-between. Many of them forced, due to the precarious economic situation, into alternative lifestyles. Counterculture, subculture, underground, bohemia — we could call it many things, but one thing is sure: their lives run counter to regular economic activities, in which they don’t participate much, if at all. They live on low-paying day jobs (some in the porn industry), food stamps, unemployment benefits, or money from their families, if they have that luxury. They get food from the soup kitchen or the dumpster.[5] They hop from couch to couch or they sleep in cars, or on the beach.

The Fourth Wall. An interview with Max Pinckers

Belgian photographer Max Pinckers successfully published a crowd-funded photobook this year, which was selected Book of the Week in July by Martin Parr for Photo-Eye. Also on Photo-Eye is Colin Pantall‘s review of The Fourth Wall: Max Pinckers’ Masala Mix. Last winter I had a Skype-conversation with Max about his dummy version of The Fourth Wall, for an interview that was published in Foam Magazine’s spring 2013 issue on photobook dummies. The version posted here slightly differs from the printed one.

Could you tell something about the subject of your photobook dummy The Fourth Wall?

As a child I lived for many years in Asia, and for my previous work, called Lotus, from which I also made a photobook, I focused on transsexuals in Thailand. For my graduation work at the KASK (School of Arts) in Ghent (B), I went on to take photographs on the Bollywood film sets in Mumbai.

When I first came to Mumbai I thought I needed to see many Bollywood movies, so I could use scenes as source material for my photographs, but I quickly figured out that I didn’t need to. Ultimately, I left it to the characters to express some of their favorite scenes. On the film sets one could always find some corners left unused. I set up my lights and found people to pose for me. I used these backgrounds to create my own images – the pink cloud in the empty bedroom, for example. I asked the producer if I could let off a smoke bomb, and he gave me permission to do so.

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