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APERTURE MAGAZINE sixty years on

Dialogue

SUBLIME PROXIMITY A CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD MOSSE Dear Friends,

INTERVIEW WITH AARON SCHUMAN

It has been sixty years since Minor White, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Nancy and Beaumont

Ncwhall, and othersver ledthe the course creationofof the the last firstseven years, Irish

hard facts in order to illustrate breaking news. Yet through his work—generaffy photographed advance, and graphed debate about photography that day,Yugoslavia, postwar ruins inSince the former in targe format and presented large scale, with a cities devastated by earthquake in Iran, penchant for the staggering, the allusive, the histhe medium has been on an extraordinary journey In Pakistan, and Haiti, the occupied palaces of Saddam Hustorical, and the Sublime—Mosse is revealed as a 1952 photography was not considered an art form. sein, airport emergency-training simulators, the practitioner intent on challenging the orthodoxToday it is very much recognized as a fine art in part, rusting wreckage of remote air disasters, nomadic ies of documentary photography, in particular because of the work of those who started Aperture rebels in the Congolese jungle, and more. Reading the contexts, imperatives, and ‘responsibilities’ Foundation. Collectors andcatalog museums treasure matter, their one could through his of subject that are often both assumed by and imposed photographs,easily many assume of whichthat wereMosse taken or inspired is an inveterate photoupon the documentary genre, and indeed upon by the originaljoumalist ApertureInfounders. Thanks to digital the most traditional sense. 4 chasing the photographic medium as a whole. issue of Aperture magazine—to promote interest photographer Richard Mossein,has photo-

is an everyday language that billions use for daily communication. Aperture Foundation has made and will continue to make a significant impact on photographic consciousness. We celebrate this accomplishment, and have an opportunity to reflect on what has happened with photography, and what our future might be. There have been dramatic changes in the way we take images, share them, and publish the results of our work- Publishing photography also has changed

Sincerely,

dramatically and will continue to change- We need to draw inspiration from the vision of our founders to adapt to the new reality. The reasons for the creation of Aperture are every bit as relevant today. We must— as they had to— understand, navigate, and shape this

Celso Gonzalez-Falla

new exciting landscape.

Chairman, Board of Trustees

Celso Gonzalez

technology, cell phones, and the Internet, photography

Content

1-7 Conversations with Richard Mosse

8-12 Lavina Yann Gross

9-17 Urban Archaelogy Andrew Moose

18 Artist Index

Fold out Evening Program

Dialogue

SUBLIME PROXIMITY A CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD MOSSE INTERVIEW WITH AARON SCHUMAN

Colonel Soleil’s Boys, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2010;

hard facts in order to illustrate breaking news. Yet through his work—generaffy photographed in targe format and presented large scale, with a penchant for the staggering, the allusive, the historical, and the Sublime—Mosse is revealed as a practitioner intent on challenging the orthodoxies of documentary photography, in particular the contexts, imperatives, and ‘responsibilities’ that are often both assumed by and imposed upon the documentary genre, and indeed upon the photographic medium as a whole.

ver the course of the last seven years, Irish photographer Richard Mosse has photographed postwar ruins in the former Yugoslavia, cities devastated by earthquake in Iran, Pakistan, and Haiti, the occupied palaces of Saddam Hussein, airport emergency-training simulators, the rusting wreckage of remote air disasters, nomadic rebels in the Congolese jungle, and more. Reading through his catalog of subject matter, one could easily assume that Mosse is an inveterate photojoumalist In the most traditional sense. 4 chasing

RICHARD MOSSE: I come from a family of artists. My grandfather was a sculptor, my uncle is a painter, and my mother studied at Cooper Union in New York under Hans Haacke, so becoming an artist was very natural. My parents are potters, and photography seemed like a kind of antidote to that. Its lightsensitive simulation is at a far remove from ceramics, so I took to it at an early age. Shards of pottery that were formed from earth by hand will outlive us all, unlike photographs, which will perish in the sunlight that they once traced. Photography allowed me to be an artist without working in anyone’s shadow. That’s especially the case in Ireland where the medium is not so celebrated, in spite of seminal work by Willie Doherty. Paul Seawright, Donovan Wylie, and others. Initially I was drawn to cinema as a teenager, and became obsessed with the French New Wave. But I found the military-style hierarchy of working in a

and the Architectural Association. Studying there gave me the freedom to integrate my own photographs into a written examination of the postwar Balkan landscape, and things evolved from there.

RM: I think it’s important that photography is cut through with other disciplines and a wider understanding of the world. Though I loved spending my days in the university’s library, a life in academia seemed removed from lived experience. I wanted to be a maker rather than a critic, a producer rather than a consumer. Photography is an engagement with the world of things, and it has given me a genuine pretext to travel widely and experience what James Joyce called “good warm life.” I’m most excited when there’s an elision of the critical and the creative in my work, so I haven’t discarded my academic foundations. Instead I try to build on them.

concentrated on my degree in English literature. I dug deeper into a career in academia, getting a master’s called the London Consortium—a research body formed in the interstices between the University of London, Tate, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Architectural Association. Studying there gave me the freedom to integrate my own photographs into a written examination of the postwar Balkan landscape, and things evolved from there. Initially I was drawn to cinema as a teenager, and became obsessed with the French New Wave. But I found the military-style hierarchy of working in a concentrated on my degree in English literature. I dug deeper into a career in academia, getting a master’s called the London Consortium—a research body formed in the interstices between the University of London, Tate, the Institute of Contemporary Art,

at the time I wrote that, I was working at Art monthly, a British art magazine. I wasn’t uet fully practicing as an artist. I was the listings editor, consuming gallery press releases all day long - the best art education possible. Sol LeWitt’s statement now seem slightly tautological. Perhaps a better quote to answer your qeustion might be from Robert Adams: “photgraphers have generally been

Colonel Soleilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Boys, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2010;

held to a different set of responsibilities than have spread supposition the phohotohg want to and can give us objective Trust: the word ‘documentory’ has abetted the prejudice. But does photographer really have less right to arrange life into a composition, into form, than a paintor or sculptor? Where LeWitt uses the word traditions, Adam says responsibilties. How much more limiting are your traditions when they are saturated with moral imperative? The photographer is expected to be “responsibile” but respnsible to whom? Documentary photographers whose work bears some relation to photojournalism are particularly contrained. Their expressive arteies have been hardened by years of World Press photo Awards and the shadow of the interpid photojournalist sporting a scarf and Leica. Where would be if Robert Frank had hidden his Leica in a scarf ?

I found myseil in Harti this spring, snooting for a sion, and I ended Ethiopia my guide got us lost on the Eritrean border, a recent war zone. Our vehicle’s four-wheel-drive malfunctioned, and the engine overheated constantly. The driver stopped every halfhour to pour tinned tomato puree into the radiator to cool it down. Then we were tricked by Afar tribesmen with Kalashnikovs into taking the wrong road, which we traveled for days, ending up in a refugee camp. My crew feared potential intertribal violence so we decided to sleep in the police station. When

Cruiser’s trres got stuck rn the desert sand, the seven armed guards who were traveling with us started to guide began to pray. I had to dig the vehicle out of the sand. We never reached our destination. It was an invigorating jaunt, but not a sustainable way of life.

Aftermath photography took everything interesting about the New Topographies and turned it into a movie set. Thankfully, there’s a place for these photographers . . . it’s called Detroit.

Guilty as charged. Although even if some of my work is similar in form to aftermath photography.’I do feel there is a distinct difference in both my approach and intent. For the Romantic poets, the ruin carried tremendous allegorical power, and that power resounds today in contemporary pho-tography. Perhaps the ruin’s absent totality back then—its timeless resonance shifts for each generation. Nevertheless, we are still drawn to the same imagery that Caspar David Friedrich was. I’m not so sure that we’re always honest with ourselves about this fascination. The thing that strikes me about a lot of aftermath photography is the moral high ground that the photographers often take. Their journey into darkness becomes a kind of “performance of the ethical”; witnessing the catastrophe becomes an act of piety, of noblesse oblige, when in fact it’s nothing of the sort. I would imagine that most after-

fact it’s nothing of the sort. I would imagine that most aftermath photography is really just an artist’s quest to I’m reminded of the poete maudit, the Romantic antihero who will go to the ends of the earth and transgress all moral boundaries for the ultimate aesthetic experience. This irresponsible, self-destructive rogue was best embodied in the crapulent, wayward lives of artists like Arthur Rimbaud or Raul Gauguin. The “responsibilities” that seem to preclude the niaucftt in photography.

Last summer 1 found myself trespassing in an abandoned, war-damaged hotel near Dubrovnik. I tinkered Yugoslav relics from 1991. the year that the hotel became Croat militias. Then, as I was making my way through the wreckage. I noticed a modern cruise ship anchored in the nearby waters. This huge luxury vessel mirrored the hotel in form; the oarallel between the two vast structures was uncanny, and I began to think about their relationship. Placed alongside each other, what sort of dialogue did they open up? The cruise ship. I reasoned, is tourists comfortably numb within their air-conditioned matrix, blissfully ignorant of the traces of war facing them on the cliff. The ruined hotel, on the other hand, spoke of local tribal enmities, of painful regional memothat perhaps war is the only remaining hurdle standing in the way of global amnesia; perhaps war is the only thing that redeems historical narratives in the face of this leveling of identity.

I was reminded of Guy Debord’s words. The spectacle, he writes, “is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.”

LAVINA PHOTOGRAPHS BY YANN GROSS

In the late nineteenth century, the Italian photographer and mountaineer Vittono Sella seated and photographed the Alps, the mountains that the dominated the landscape of his childhood. Sella worked during a time when wild nature was stiff regarded as a fearsome place, not a site of recreation. But cultural perceptions changed and monumental nature became attached to the concept of the sublime. Indeed, Setlaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stunning images portrayed the high-altitude & slopes and snow-capped peaks its beauty and silence. Yann Gross likewise grew op in the shadow of the Alps ion the Swiss side). A hundred or so years after Sella climbed here, the mountains are populated with resorts, images of their rocky peaks are used to promote wildness products and preventative avalanches mitigate the dangers posed by the picturesque slopes. For the past six years. Gross has worked in Valets* Switzerland* with mountain guides and researchers who trigger avalanches with dynamite in order to prevent accidents in ski resorts and other inhabited areas. (Lavina is the word tor â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;avalancheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in Romansh, spoken by a few communities in the area of eastern Switzerland where Gross is from.) To take these pictures, he climbs the peaks in front of the mountain where the avalanches wilt be triggered. Here the still frame turns the fast-moving snow into sculptural shapes; there is an elegant formalism to these scenes of humans imposing order on the wild.

“Lavina”

that perhaps war is the only remaining hurdle standing in the way of global amnesia; perhaps war is the only thing that redeems historical narratives in the face of this leveling of identity.

2004 - 2010

Detroit

URBAN ARCHAELOGY PHOTOGRAPHS & COMMENTARY BY ANDREW MOORE

n to a different set of responsibilities than have

widespread supposition the phohotohg want to and can give us objective Trust: the word ‘documentory’ has abetted the prejudice. But does photographer really have less right to arrange life into a composition, into form, than a paintor or sculptor? Where LeWitt uses the word traditions, Adam says responsibilties. How much more limiting are your traditions when they are saturated with moral imperative? The photographer is expected to be “responsibile” but respnsible to whom? Documentary photographers whose work bears some relation to photojournalism are particularly contrained. Their expressive arteies have been hardened by years of World Press photo Awards and the shadow of the interpid photojournalist sporting a scarf and Leica.

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