Images courtesy of Bertil Nilsson

After premiering his latest short film ‘Bromance’ on NOWNESS, a video channel showcasing contemporary culture through film, Miriam Otterbeck meets the Swedish artist Bertil Nilsson to discuss modern male relationships and how he employs varied mediums to explore movement and the human form.

M.O.: Always connected, the young male acrobats in Bromance seem to be very close to each other. Is the film analysing the line between their romance and friendship?

B.N.: No, the film is not about defining ‘bromance’. I am trying to show, through physical movement, the depth and complexity of modern relationships between men.

Guys don’t normally express friendship by holding hands. However, there’s an interesting parallel in hand-to-hand acrobatics, where holding hands is an essential part of the movement and also embodies the very act of trusting and relying on one another.

M.O.: Many know you as photographer, but this latest project Bromance is a short film. How did you get into filmmaking?

B.N.: Originally, when I came to London in 2004, I wanted to work in film production. Then, almost by chance, I ended up getting more involved in photography through photographing circus performers. I have always been interested in filmmaking and working with physical movement.

I started experimenting with moving images making small experimental films and now I have gotten to a point where I feel ready to explore more traditional methods of filmmaking, exploring how dance and circus can be used and understood in that context.

M.O.: How do your films relate to your photography? Are there any intersections?

B.N.: Of course there’s the visual aspect of exploring the moving body that connects them. But film as a medium is more directly oriented around narrative.

I think it’s really fascinating to explore how the themes of my work can be used or explored in the context of film in contrast with the more conceptual nature of my photography. Specifically for me, I think there’s a really fascinating tension in stills when you capture movement, how you represent or present the energy of feeling of movement in a single image. In moving images, it’s straightforward to capture and represent a moving body.

M.O.: Do certain projects work better as stills and others better as moving images?

B.N.: The themes and subjects are similar across my work, but I don’t find myself wondering whether a certain idea would work better in a particular medium because I think the medium is already an important part of how I think about the original idea.

With stills I tend to work in long or medium term project, a single image or session, is part of a longer and larger body of work that evolves slowly over time. With the short films I’m currently making, there’s a more intense process of production resulting in a single piece of work.

M.O.: Some of your work has been made using laser projections or has been printed on mirrors. How do you try to integrate new technologies into your projects?

Having a background in technology, I’m very keen to explore more ideas around using technology. I’m always interested in experimenting and trying new things and today I think many artists are using technology in incredibly interesting ways.

Bromance premiered exclusively on NOWNESS as part of the Modern Love: Romance in the 12st Century series and is now available to watch on Bertil Nilsson’s website.

You can find more of his photography and films here – www.bertil.uk.

Miriam Otterbeck is the Deputy Editor of LPD.

To take in all of Swedish artist Eva Stenram’s works installed at Siobhan Davies Dance Studios, you have to take a pretty comprehensive tour of the seminal dance company’s extraordinary building. Its design fuses original elements of the original Victorian school — with its chipped tiles and bare brick — with the recently added elements of polished concrete, glass walls and taut cables.

The architecture is so immediately attention-grabbing that any practitioner who attempted to outshine it would fall horribly flat. Luckily, Stenram’s pieces — which are hung in corridors, balcony areas and even, yes, a disabled toilet — compliment their surroundings without trying to compete with them. Acting as playful, absurd, and occasionally sinister commentaries on movement and the human form, they rise to the challenge of engaging with a potentially difficult, unconventional set-up.

This is the first time that Parts (2013 – ongoing) has been shown in the UK, and the exhibition showcases six pieces from the series. The artist has taken photographs of pin-up models from the 1960s, digitally erased everything but their legs, and printed the results onto fibre-based paper.

Stockinged and stilletoed, the single limbs are left leaning on a modernist sofa; loitering awkwardly on an enormous bed; or lying on a shag pile carpet in a Hitchcockian, wood-panelled room.

These images have more than an echo of the surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer, though they are marginally more humorous and certainly less perverse. Any eroticism that the originals 60s pin-ups may have contained is entirely diffused by the silly helplessness of a lone, racy leg still trying — and failing — to be seductive.

In Sternam’s world, a body part out of context becomes highly charged or just plain comical. In Arrangement (after Irving Klaw) (2015), installed outside one of the first floor rehearsal studios, three photographs are reframed by a passe-partout. You have to really peer in – peeping tom style – to see a flexed hand, beautifully-turned shin, or another one of those silly legs, this time clad in a clunky court shoe.

It feels like the artist is exposing the deep un-sexiness that can result from trying too hard to be sexy. In this way he highlights the fine line between looking sexually appealing and just, well, a bit pathetic.

Hold (2015) takes us on a destabilising tour of a single image using a series of slides shown on an archaic projector. In slow-mo, the work deliberately maps the process of looking at a pin-up photograph and so can be read as a meditation on the voyeuristic nature of looking. Score for A Sequence of Poses (2015) – a series of smaller photographs featuring more isolated, female limbs – makes a much heavier reference to choreographed movement. Described as ‘photographic scores’, they border on the filmic and the choice of an office-style, grey pinboard lends them a sense of a work in progress.

The pieces that operate most successfully here (works like the Parts series) utilise contemporary technologies to ask questions of historical material – just like the building that contains them.

Images courtesy of Siobhan Davis Dance.

Helena Haimes is a freelance arts and culture writer based in London. She studied at Goldsmiths College and the University of the West of England, and contributes to a range of publications as well as writing a visual arts blog.

If we believe the old adage ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ then feminism has been receiving some great publicity this past few weeks. There was The Sun’s carefully choreographed media stunt which saw the withdrawal and swift reinstatement of ‘Page Three Girls’. Then, following their wins at the Australian Open, tennis players Eugenie Bouchard and Venus Williams were asked to show off their outfits by twirling. Tory peer Karen Brady went on record to say that the word ‘feminist’ is ‘too radical and negative’ for young women to identify with. And finally, The Church of England consecrated its first female bishop, Reverend Libby Lane.

The roots of the British feminist movement are explored in The National Portrait Gallery’s recent display Suffragettes: Deeds not Words. The term ‘suffragette’ was first coined by The Daily Mail to describe a more radical element of the women’s suffrage movement. Suffragettes embraced demonstrations to catalyse social reform often chaining themselves to railings, damaging public buildings and committing arson.

The display features 13 mounted photographs and printed material. Amongst the most striking works in the display is a photograph of a portrait by John Sargent which was slashed by a suffragette. The act of vandalism resulted in many UK museums imposing restrictions on admittance to their galleries. For example, The British Museum enforced a policy of only admitting women if they were accompanied by a man who was willing to take responsibility for the woman’s actions. David Lindsay, 27th Earl of Crawford, 10th Earl of Balcarress Conservative MP and long serving trustee of the NPG was compelled to write to the director of the gallery. His letter is part of the display and makes for an interesting read.

Internal police documents and surveillance photographs are also featured in the display. Presented in a grid-like formation, the photographs call to mind what one would imagine was the authority’s fantasy line-up of suffragettes. The photograph of actress Kitty Marion stands apart from the others due to the fact it is in fact her acting headshot.

Opponents to the movement argued that the radical actions of the Suffragettes proved them to be unsound decision makers, and therefore inappropriate to vote. In other documents on display, the actions of the Suffragettes are described in emotive language with passages referring to ‘aggressive tactics’, ‘serious vandalism’ and ‘shocking damage’.

The display paints a picture of a time when civil disobedience was an effective device to bring the core issues of the time into the public domain. What the suffragettes would think of how feminist issues make the public domain today, who knows, but as David Lindsay commented on the attack of the NPG portrait it ‘shows how much we really are at the mercy of women who are determined…’

Kiritia is a visual storyteller at heart and a marketing consultant by trade. She holds a BA from the University of Tasmania and studied Marketing, Advertising & PR at Queens University Belfast.
Check out her Facebook and Twitter

Thomas Struth (German, born 1954) is widely recognized as one of the most important photographers from the second half of the 20th century. In this exhibition, one can discover the Metropolitan Museum’s unparalleled holdings of photographs from this master photographer. An intimate exhibition in size, it nevertheless allows visitors to gauge Struth’s absolute grandeur.

The life-size photographs are an almost recursive encounter. Struth presents groups of captivated tourists, embraced by art and architecture that seem to devour them with their magnitude. This can be said of the resounding presence of Milan Cathedral, the Pantheon in Rome or the Imperial City in Tiananmen Square. The NASDAQ may be another face of the great forces that deceitfully invade our space. However, unlike the other monuments, its presence does not gather much notice, admiration or celebration, despite its immensity.

The exhibition is also an opportunity to discover or re-discover the series of street scenes – mostly from the late 1970s – from New York, Venice or Chicago. Although these scenes are an ode to global architecture (or its globalization), they leave the viewer unsettled due to the striking absence of human figures. Unless united by a devotional gaze, people only appear in Struth’s universe in intimate settings, for example Eleonor and Giles Robertson, both historians, in their Edinburgh home or the Restorers in their studio at San Lorenzo Maggiore, Naples.

The exhibition manages to be compelling and comprehensive with only 25 images from the late 1970s to 2013.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, until February 16, 2015

Reine Ullmann Okuliar

Credit: Thomas Struth, Pantheon, Rome (1990), via MetMuseum.org

 New York Photography Diary met with Sasha Wolf, director of Sasha Wolf Gallery at 70 Orchard Street, to discuss her experience, her gallery and how being a gallery owner is changing in contemporary culture.

Catherine Troiano: Tell us a bit about yourself and how you started out.

Sasha Wolf: I did a lot of photography when I was young in high school. My father made television commercials and taught me how to use a camera – he was actually a very good photographer. When I was in college I thought I wanted to be a writer, but then I’ve always been in love with film. When I was growing up there were more independent theatres than there are now. I loved old movies, so I would to go to a theatre that would show double bills of old Humphrey Bogart or John Huston films.
When I was in college, a real turning point for me was seeing a John Sayles film called Return of the Secaucus 7. It’s funny, because sometimes I think in retrospect you create narratives of how things happened, but this is really how it happened to me. It was one of those films that was shot with no budget, nor really any plot. It was about old friends getting together over a weekend and was almost like the precursor to the film The Big Chill – but a low budget version with a bunch of actors who weren’t particularly great.
I remember that it was a lightening bolt moment for me because it felt like real life. It was poignant, I was very moved by it compared to how I felt about Hollywood films. I was too young in the so-called great age of American cinema in the 1960s and early 1970s where people like Terrence Malick and Mike Nichols were making films like The Graduate or Bad Lands, so I grew up with the bigger films like Star Wars. When I saw that you could actually make a film that was more about real life, I felt I wanted to be a filmmaker, which was good because I wasn’t a very good writer. So, I started getting involved in filmmaking.
I supported myself with jobs in the production world and working at production houses, and I wound up in a very expensive, intensive program at NYU for filmmaking. But, I also worked for my dad over the summers, so I was learning a lot about photography too. Eventually, I got really burnt out in filmmaking because, in order to support a very expensive habit of actually making the films, I worked in the film and television industry, which I hated. It just wasn’t for me, and I got to the point where I couldn’t go on in that industry any more.
The last film I made was a short film nominated for a Palm D’Or at Cannes, so I thought ‘this is a good place to stop!’. I’d had a wonderful time, I was really proud of all the work I had done and I didn’t know what I was going to do next, but I was still making a lot of photographs. I’d actually built a dark room in my apartment so I was still very involved in photography and it just sort of came to me. The truth is sort of fantastical, again, but I was lying in bed at around 3am and I thought ‘aren’t there something called private dealers?’.
I had no experience in the art world so I jumped up, googled it, started learning about it and decided that’s what I was going to do. For five years, I found artists who’s work I liked and, because I had a lot of connections in the film and television world (I had spent a lot of time in LA), I would go out to the west coast, almost like a travelling salesperson, with photographs and sell work. I’d have pop up shows in my apartment and five years later I had enough financial, moral and intellectual support to open a gallery. I didn’t really want to open a gallery; I didn’t really want the overhead and the having to get up at a certain time every day, but I did it. It was a really bizarre entrance to the industry because I had never worked in a gallery. So, when I first started I had to call people I’d met, like Tom Gitterman or Michael Foley and ask ‘how do you write an invoice?’. I didn’t know anything! ‘How do you pack a print?’. I appreciate the support I got from people I had been introduced to.

CT: How do you decide what to show and who to represent?

SW: I show work that I feel the most passionately about. People misunderstand and think that because I don’t show any highly conceptual (first of all, I think all work is conceptual, but just to stick with the terms that we use) work or work that’s made on a computer or that has been highly manipulated, that I somehow have disdain or a lack of respect for that type of work – that’s really not true. There are artists whom I love working in that way, but it’s not my passion.
My passion is for work that is of the physical world and where I feel that for me as a viewer there is an easier entrée into that work. I always say, with work that that I would call new documentary or post-documentary, that there’s more room for my fantasies if I’m not overly concerned with what the artist was intending. Having said that, it is incredibly important to me that all the work that I show is very authored, that it has a strong point of view and that it feels very much like it’s coming from the deep recesses of their psyche. But, I do find that when it is work that is of the material world and when it’s something I really recognize, that there’s more room for my own fantasies. I think it’s important to specialize in something and it’s a no-brainer for me to specialize in these things that I feel most connected to and passionately about.

CT: How important is it to you that your artists have had a formal education in photography?

SW: It’s not. I don’t care whether my artists have been to the best schools or no schools. What’s important to me is that they have incredible depth of knowledge of the history of photography. Whether they learned that themselves or whether they learned that in school, it doesn’t matter to me. I think that all work at this point is riffing off other work. I’m not that interested in people reinventing the wheel; I think that when people get too preoccupied with doing something totally new it can lead them astray from their own voice.
But, it is important that if their work is part of a genre or similar to an artist that came before them, that they somehow incorporate that as a riff. Almost like if you listen to someone like Dave Brubeck or a lot of great jazz musicians, they often incorporate other songs into the songs that they’re playing. It will have little flurries and parts of other songs, and I think that’s more or less the way I think of what I want from my artists. If I say to them, oh my gosh, this has Harry Callahan in it, I don’t want them to say ‘really?’, I want them to say ‘Oh, that’s so great that you noticed, because I definitely look to Callahan as an inspiration’ – I think that’s great.

CT: Do you ever have to negotiate your own taste with the needs of the gallery or do the two usually align?

SW: I only show what I love, and for sure there have been times when that has been detrimental. I could be showing work that’s easier, but I don’t have any interest in owning a business so there’s no gain for me in working with anything that I don’t love. There’s plenty of work involved in running a business that is not fun, from picking insurance companies to figuring out gallery software systems, so I’m not going to compromise on the work I show. It’s also really important to me that when I talk to potential and existing clients that my enthusiasm is real, I don’t want to be acting. I think it’s important for me to be as authentic as the work that I’m showing.

CT: Your shows are always impeccably edited, is this process something that you enjoy doing or do you approach it with apprehension?

SW: I love editing. If I had my way, all I would be doing is looking for new artists, editing work, curating shows and working on book projects. I wouldn’t be doing anything else. I’d be working with my favourite clients because they’re like me, obsessed with photography. It’s fun when you have great clients who are photo-junkies, it’s great to talk with them about what they’re seeing in the gallery that they love, what I love and which my favourite pieces are. I feel blessed to have a lot of clients who feel like I do.
I consider myself a photo-addict. If I was wealthy, my collection would be out of control because I fall in love with at least one photograph a day. But, I love editing and I consider myself a pretty ruthless editor. I have a philosophy which is that when you look at bodies of work, whether in gallery shows or whether in books (and this is where a lot of people and I part ways), if you fell in love with something at the beginning you should remember it at the end. It’s not my intention to overwhelm someone or to be repetitious unless the repetition is integral to the body of work.
I love being ruthless. All the work has got to be great. There’s no reason for it to just be good, unless it’s really informing something, in which case including it makes sense. Otherwise, it doesn’t need to be there. And I’m perfectly comfortable with shows or books that have 15 photographs. That doesn’t mean that the artist doesn’t have a larger body of work that’s incredibly comprehensive, it just means that for this experience I don’t want to overwhelm you. I want you to be able to stand in front of an image, take your time and know that you’ll be able to get to the end of the show and still remember the first thing that you fell in love with.

CT: The gallery has been in several different locations, including your own apartment. Has the art or your clients changed or been influenced by the various locations?

SW: I don’t think so. I don’t think location has really had much effect. I know that the location that I’m in now on the lower east side feels the most aligned with my own sensibilities. It feels like a very nice, clean show space in some ways – it’s very white – but in other ways it feels like a salon. I feel like myself, the people who work with me in the gallery and clients are all very comfortable here. I think they’ve been comfortable at every space, I think every space has been quite elegant and warm at the same time – it’s always what I’m trying to achieve. But, I think this space is a very comfortable space, which is important. I want people to look forward to coming to see me.

CT: How are the day-to-day operations different on the LES in comparison to, for example TriBeCa, or your more recent location in Chelsea?

SW: I don’t think there’s anything different about being on the Lower East Side as far as the gallery goes. I think that my experience is very different because it’s extremely collegiate down here, I’m located on a street made up of many small businesses about which their owners feel very passionately about.
On one side, we have a vintage clothing store that is very high end and impeccably curated, on the other side we have a jewellery store where all the jewellery is made by the store’s owner, a couple of doors down is a men’s clothing store where all of the clothing is made by the owner Robert James, and on and on it goes down the block. There’s something that’s extremely energizing and wonderful about a very collegiate location, where you can talk to each other about your woes, your high points, low points – everyone’s really pulling for each other and that’s a very different experience for me.

CT: How do you make sense of the ever-growing art fair circuit?

SW: I think in general, like everything else in life, things change. When I first opened the gallery almost 8 years ago, I made a rule that none of my artists could be represented by any other gallery. They could be in shows and I would work to have them shown in as many other places as possible, but I would be their gallery. This was considered really out of the norm, but the gallery world is still stuck in some ways, like a lot of businesses, in an old model that doesn’t take the internet and the way technology works into account. For instance, the model used to work very well – you had to be in galleries on the west coast, the east coast, in Chicago, in Houston and so on because there was no other way for people to see your work.
But now, my best clients are on the west coast, period. I sell the most to people on the west coast and all the transactions are done by them looking at the work online, calling me and us having in-depth conversations. If my artists were represented by galleries on the west coast, all of those sales would go to those galleries.
I think that art fairs are just another part of the way in which the art world is evolving from people figuring out ways in which they can make things work better or differently. I personally don’t love art fairs because they’re really, really tiring. They take you out of the gallery, there’s a lot of small talk that goes on, which isn’t something I love – I prefer to have more in-depth conversations with people so I find it psychologically challenging to stand around for four to five days and possibly not have one of those conversations with anyone.
But, it doesn’t matter – that’s the way it is now and it is a lot easier. If you’re a big collector in Brussels, it’s a lot easier for you to come in for Armory Week and do all your buying at once rather than going around a million different galleries. I think of galleries like showrooms. It’s a really nice office, but we don’t really sell shows. We just sell work, it’s about continually selling work that people are interested in and you never know what that’s going to be. Art fairs are just another part of the crapshoot now. But, if it makes it a lot easier for people to buy work, then of course it’s going to be successful. There’s no way it’s going to stop if the client, the person who is spending the money, has deemed it incredibly convenient. Then, it’s going to continue and we all have to just adapt to that.

CT: The gallery is one of a small-ish number that exclusively show photography. What are the advantages and disadvantages to that?

SW: I think that there are not many advantages but they are very clear, which is that if you love photography and you love the type of post-documentary work that I show, then you know that if you come in here that’s what you’ll get. We tend to hear that a lot – people come in and say how much they love coming because they know that whenever they stop by they’re going to be rewarded. That is a real joy for me to hear, I’m so happy when people tell me that. So, I feel like there’s a real, clear advantage to having your niche because it means people can count on you for something.
I think the disadvantages are pretty big. I get a much smaller slice of the potential collector pie and that pie is very small to begin with. The amount of people who are going to spend their money on original artwork versus putting money towards their kid’s college fund, a vacation, a new sofa or a down-payment on a house is incredibly small, so it’s even smaller if you’re only considering photography. But, this is what I love, so this is what I do. I don’t think it’s the best business plan, but it’s what I’m stuck with.

CT: How do you think photography collectors are different from collectors of broader art?

SW: I don’t. I think that people, just like I have as a photography gallerist, find things that they love. Whether you’re a stamp collector or you collect baseball cards, you find something that you love and that speaks to you for whatever reason. I think that being a collector means you have a particular type of personality. Most people are not collectors of anything, but if you’re a collector of something you’re a certain type of person. I don’t know what that type of person is, I don’t want to examine it too closely, but you’re definitely a particular type of person.

CT: Do you collect for yourself, other than photography?

SW: I collect 90% photography and 10% whatever, if I see something that I love. I own a couple of paintings and a couple of drawings and two pieces of sculpture. So not a lot, but when I see something I love, I’ll buy it! I’m a collector, which means I’ll spend money I don’t have. Unfortunately, the paying off of things over time is something that’s a part of my life.

CT: Finally, do you have any advice for young photographers?

SW: I have a lot of advice for young photographers, but to be concise I’ll pick the most important thing, well, couple of things. One is that you have to shoot in your own voice, but that’s advice I’d give to any artist. It doesn’t matter what you love – when I was a filmmaker I used to write things that were somewhat whimsical, almost like magical realism, which is not by any means my favourite genre of film but it was my voice. You cannot go against that, you have to honour it even if it’s not what you were expecting or hoping for. I’d say that’s the number one thing.
On a practical note, I would say never underestimate the importance of networking, even in the art world. That means being as charming, gracious, humble and giving as possible. I could cite a million examples of people who were making good work, never got picked up by a gallery, but were always hanging around being endearing. Little by little, they were included in more group shows until they were picked up. Just like in any other walk of life, being likeable, getting out there and meeting people is very important.

Catherine Troiano is co-editor of New York Photography Diary. She is Gallery Manager at a New York photography gallery, who also works independently as a curatorial consultant and researcher. She has experience in various institutions in New York, Edinburgh and London, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, currently, the Sasha Wolf Gallery. She holds an MA in History of Art from the University of Edinburgh, and her interests include inter-war Eastern European photography, Hungarian art and contemporary art.

Hemera Collective meets Sheyi Bankale, curator of Photo50 at London Art Fair 2015 to talk about the exhibition ‘Against Nature’, his editorial and curatorial practice, and the current place of photography within contemporary art.

Kay Watson: Could you introduce us to the concept of the exhibition and why you chose it?

Sheyi Bankale: The exhibition Against Nature is a concept that I took from the book by Joris-Karl Huysmans of the same title. The relationship between objects and desire are themes which run throughout the book and I wanted to explore how they might be transcribed into an exhibition format. The book was published in the 1800s, around the same time as the invention of photography. It made a decisive break from traditional forms – away from realism and towards symbolism. So in a sense you had this literary world and this photographic world simultaneously breaking new boundaries. I found this parallel extremely interesting. It was equally an extremely prolific time in photography – there were so many different physical forms and processes within the medium. These concerns run throughout the show. Specifically, I wanted to consider photography as an object and try to identify how we view photography today, especially considering the massive shifts the medium has experienced.
The shift from the early 19th century to the 20th century saw the birth of the first 35mm camera, the 1960s saw the advent of colour photography, and one of the latest shift is, of course, the digital age. This digital shift is something that I wanted to address because we often look at images in a digital rather than physical form.

Nikolai Ishchuk, Leak X and Leak IX, 2014.

Jaime Marie Davis: So, how do we now view images and how can we change that through the exhibition?
What I thought it was really interesting to consider the digital plane and how photography is currently used within the medium. Many of the artists on show have adopted anachronistic approaches such as the photogram. They have tried to understand how different methods, processes and applications have shifted away from digital aspects. One example is Nikolai Ishchuk whose work is devoid of any functionality. He looks at the processes and material itself using some of the metals within aspects of photography to form solid sculptural objects.

J.M.D: As the largest photography exhibition ever staged in Finland Alice In Wonderland was one of the noteworthy projects of your curatorial career. The exhibition has some thematic links to Against Nature if we consider the notion of ‘constructing worlds’ or the relationship between the ‘real and unreal.’ Is this a continued line of inquiry in your curatorial practice?

S.B: My practice looks at metaphysical objects and ideologies within this world and considers how one might transcend an object and transcend the meaning of that object. So, you could say Against Nature is a sequel, in a sense, to Alice In Wonderland. But I look at photography as contemporary art and photography as a material-based medium that can shift and change and can have parallel existences. It can exist as a 2D print form but it can also exist as a material base in itself.

Alice and Wonderland was interesting because we were looking at artists globally who were trying to create a different vision of their work, as opposed to just the representation of a photograph. They were playing with surfaces and rendering ideas to create physical objects that were photographically based. Julio Galeote’s work is heavily indebted to a sense of ‘wonderland’. He looks at objects with a very different perspective, a dream state where an object is stripped of all its meaning and then re-represented, and documented as a photograph. Therefore, the photograph becomes the meaning of that new object. When you approach his work it looks like a regular photographic body of work, but when you start to understand his methodologies and ideologies, then all those different layers start to reveal themselves as an object versus a photograph.

Julio Galeote, Excess n.1, 2012.

J.M.D: One thing that interests me is the way you work between editorial and curatorial roles, which have similar methodologies for constructing narratives. But they also deal with images differently as they move from static and viral to physical. How has your editorial role influenced your curatorial decisions, specifically in relation to the audience’s relationship to images as a physical encounter?

S.B: I think there is a parallel relationship between editorial practice and curatorial practice. They both work hand in hand and I don’t think one takes precedence. In a sense, the editorial is still a curatorial role within my practice – it’s working with words and images. I use the actual plane of the paper as a white cube and I have a very close relationship with the printer that I use because, for me, the publication is equally an exhibition space.

I find that the way editorial and curatorial differ, is in how the audience navigates through the space and digests the work. It’s a different feeling than the publication, which is a reception to the work versus an exhibition where it is transmitted. In the publication there is a mental digestion and, depending on who the audience is, they can extend that.

K.W: Thinking about the context of Photo50 within the London Art Fair – and Next Level, which looks at photography within the context of contemporary art – what do you consider to be the current position of the photographic image within contemporary art?

S.B: Photography is multifaceted. There are so many ways of thinking about it. Within the arts, there is a body of practitioners who conduct their practice as photographers. I think that is the issue as their practice can shift into different realms of photography such as editorial or commissioned work and there are so many different practices that take place within the medium of photography.

The question of whether photography fits within contemporary art is a divisive one. However I see photography as an art form. For me, it’s a medium that has a great fluidity within contemporary art. Especially now when we consider its form in the digital age, take for example the 3D representations of Jonny Briggs’. The beautiful aspect about photography is that it is always evolving; there is always a new application or process that is being applied to shape how we perceive photography today.

Jonny Briggs, Super Natural.

K.W: I also find this continually changing status of the photograph interesting, where a photograph used for one purpose, is then picked up to be used for multiple purposes between media. For example a post card is a photograph of a ‘view’, but is also something that is shared freely amongst people.

S.B: What’s really interesting, and who picks up on this is Darren Harvey Reagan. He looks at the subject or object that exists in the world, which is identified, then the photographic representation of that object and how that’s transmitted and, like you said, whether it’s tactile and exists for one viewer or shared amongst an audience, and finally photograph object itself or materiality of the photograph and its layers where the artists applies paints or different materials. )

J.M.D: Thinking about the literal meaning of the exhibition title, Against Nature brings to mind what I would say is a growing concern with what artists and other curators such as TJ Demos have claimed holds ‘essentialist thinking as much as gesturing towards a fantasy world apart from human activity’ and that we have entered a post-natural condition. Is this consideration of a ‘post natural’ condition also a double meaning or underlying concern given the included works by Julio Galeote such as his ‘Excess’ series?

S.B: Julio Galeote has a double entendre feel to his works and he definately touches deals with these issues. It’s also something that the book by JK Huysman alludes to, because one of the central characters isolates himself from human contact and creates a fantasy world within the home. The whole idea is that he is looking at how to shift meanings of objects and subjects within their plane. That is a challenge for a lot of artists and curators: to look at the fundamentals of nature, to return to areas outside of human existence and to have conversations along those lines. It’s a very small part of the exhibition but Julio’s work epitomises that. He hits on an important issue, one which, as you say, is of increasing importance in visual art discourses.

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Two years ago, Allan Sekula proposed that all ‘new documentary’ had a tendency towards ‘subjectivism’ and ‘authorial self-revelation’1. Jo Metson Scott’s five year The Grey Line is a good example of what Sekula meant by this seemingly contradictory statement. Contradictory, because documentary photography (or film for that matter), has typically been aligned with a detachment of the photographer from an area of study; the myth of objectivity and the delusion that one’s presence as witness does not influence the photographic results.

Sekula’s criticism of documentary photography is not new to the world of contemporary photography. Documentary photography is now readily accepted as art. Jo Metson Scott’s socio-politically motivated project is very much positioned within an art context. Her inquiry into armed forces personnel who have gone AWOL is explored subjectively with a distinctly personalised perspective. Metson Scott both recognises and subverts journalistic convention and codes of the ‘journalistic turn’ to create an yet very personal project.

The ‘journalistic turn’ can be defined as an approach which exposes research and constructs the work using text/image formats. Taryn Simon’s A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters and Jim Goldberg’s Open See are recent examples. These works are rooted in a desire to understand as opposed to simply capture the subject. They seek to expose complex narratives despite the medium’s inherent reductive characteristics.

Clearly visible in both works, are captions and short textual extracts which contextualise the material in a manner similar to the way magazine and newspaper articles append photographs to text. As daily consumers of media our eyes are well adjusted such juxtapositions of text and image. The authority and ethics that come from news media sources conform to our expectations of how the ‘truth’ is told. Yet Metson Scott precludes this by exposing her sketchbooks, which through their honesty and direct relationship to her research add an extra layer of authenticity to the work.

We don’t appear to be looking at highly mediated, edited or polished work; instead, we are taken through Metson Scott’s own diaristic entries and processes. An example of how self-reflexivity might add authenticity to documentary practice.

Does empathy drive documentary photography or indeed our desire to look at Metson Scott’s work? Perhaps it does so through this humanitarian connection with the unfortunate experiences of those who have been overlooked by society and ostracised unfairly. This work shows how war photography has shifted its direction towards home, where survival for these ex-soldiers takes on a different form. This work brings the effects of war to our doorsteps.

Metson Scott’s subjectivity is projected onto us. It shines a light on the subject without victimisation and sensationalist mediation. Documentary in this way – by embracing subjectivity – renews its validity in the face of its own potential collapse through changing attitudes to authority and systems of power.

We can’t be sure of what it feels like to be one of these former soldiers who chose not to participate; photographs alone can’t possibly do that. But we can be sure of Metson Scott’s work, through sensitive and careful study, allows us into her subjective. In the end, we want to know and feel for the people she has given a voice to.

1.Sekula, Allan, ‘Eleven Premises on Documentary and a Question in Mutations, Perspectives on Photography, Paris Photo/Steidl, 2011, p. 265.

Sunil Shah is an artist and curator based in Oxford, UK. He is interested in the politics of photographic representation and conceptual post-documentary practices with relation to history, memory and identity. He has undertaken several curatorial projects including Making Home at the Royal Geographic Society, London for the HLF funded Exiles Project and acted as co-curator for Brighton Photo Fringe Open ’13. He holds degrees from Coventry University and the University of Westminster. www.sunilshah.info

I always wondered why international photographers are drawn to the depiction of Chinese factories. Are they shocked by their scale? Do they wish to portray factory workers as robots? Or is it something else?

When I first saw this photograph by Edward Burtynsky I was attracted by its colour, the way it was framed and its interesting perspective. Bright yellow unites the image on a whole, from the uniforms, to the factory flags, and finally the factory itself.

The people are presented as part of mechanism. They are integrated, or perhaps, are forced to integrate. The bright yellow of the workers’ uniforms advances into the distance creating an illusion that the image is endless.

Growing up in China, Marxism was taught from a young age. However, until very recently, I had never read Marx’s original works. In schools Marxism is reduced down to small quotes on textbooks. Rather than reading the original text, we were asked to recite particular passages. Had I read Marx’s original texts I might have understood what this photograph was edging towards. Now, when looking at this photograph, a line from The Communist Manifesto (1872)

“Masses of labourers, crowed into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine by the overlooker, and, and above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.”

In many ways this quote could form the caption to Burtynsky’s photograph. Or maybe Burtynsky had this quote in his mind when he released the shutter? For me, the photograph visually encapsulates the exploitation of workers. And in the end, there’s a strange irony in the fact this image was taken in a country that instills Marxism in its children.

Fangfei is a Ph.D candidate of History at the University of Essex, with a primary focus on the research of photographic materials. She is from China and has an MA in Arts Market Appraisal from Kingston University, and an MA from the University of St. Andrews in the History of Photography. She has worked as Assistant Manager in the Beijing Huachen Photography Department, as well as working for several photographic archives such as in the University of St. Andrews. Her interviews and reviews have been published by Art Gallery, Art Guide and The World of Photography, among other publications. Her interests include the history of Chinese photography, the photographic market, management,  festivals and installation.

Francesca Woodman’s self-portraiture is deliberately enigmatic. If she aspires to be enigmatic, she also employs enigma to challenge the traditions of self-portraiture. Her self-portraits are duplicitous; the clarity of the photograph appears to present an intelligible subject and yet Woodman continually facilitates the subject’s withdrawal from our gaze.

In her self-portraits the artist often pioneered new forms of relational aesthetics aimed towards formal intervention as opposed to a biographical display that might be intended to assert one’s identity. In Self Portrait at Thirteen (Colorado,1972), the artist’s long dark hair obscures her face hindering the camera’s inherent descriptive and informative qualities.

In Untitled (Providence, Rhode Island,1975), the artist disappears into herself. Three nude women, one of whom is Woodman, hold photographs of the artist’s face over their own. A fourth print, which differs from the other three, is pinned on the wall beside them.One of the models Sloan Rankin notes that Woodman made a sketch of the idea before executing it photographically. “It is a picture about physical measurement, and Woodman writes, under the sketch, a picture about being my model.”1 Disappearing behind a self-portrait, Francesca Woodman conceals her identity. The image’s focus on surface representation obliterates the spectator’s capacity to identify the subject it represents.

If the quintessential self-portrait announces this is who I am, the New York series (1979) announces rather I am another, similar to Arthur Rimbaud’s radical announcement of modern identity in the mid nineteenth century. His famous poem ‘Je est un autre’
(I is someone else) has been employed to describe many forms of subversive visions of mutable identity.

In one of the New York images, Untitled (1979) she holds a fishbone against her spine. Here she is not fantasising about being another through a performance of identity, as is the case for Rimbaud; instead her body is read as an autonomous entity but at the same time as part of her surroundings.

Rather than engaging with the well-established medium of portraiture in a conventional manner, Woodman is keenly aware that by altering the medium’s modes one can reveal the most profound truths about the subject.

Image credits: Untitled (Providence, Rhode Island,1975), Untitled (New York 1979).

Francesca Marcaccio (b.1981) is a writer, artist, and curator specialised in photography. She is based in London, UK. Her research focuses on photographic archives and documentary photography and their relationship with issues of memory and history within contemporary art practice.She holds degrees in Art History, Iconographic Research and Photography.Recently she completed the RCA/Curating Conversations Programme.She writes for DUST Magazine and MyTemplArt.