PREVIEW Foam Magazine Issue #35 Lust

#35 Lust Summer 2013 €19,50

Antoine d’Agata / Maxime Ballesteros / Larry Clark / Jacqueline Hassink / Mao Ishikawa / Paul Kooiker & Erik Kessels / Rico & Michael / Martin Stöbich

Please enjoy this preview of our latest issue.

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Antoine d’Agata / Maxime Ballesteros / Larry Clark / Jacqueline Hassink / Mao Ishikawa / Paul Kooiker & Erik Kessels / Rico & Michael / Martin Stöbich

3 Editorial

foam magazine # 35 lust

4 Portfolio Overview 6 On My Mind Ann McNeill, Aron Morel, Rena Effendi, Emma Bowkett, Will Steacy, Marnix Goossens 12 Interview Viviane Sassen It's a Kind of Magic

by Merel Bem 19 Theme introduction Lust for Life

by Marcel Feil

Portfolios 29 Mao Ishikawa Body Heat text by Marc Feustel 49 Paul Kooiker & Erik Kessels Terribly Awesome Photobooks text by Francesco Zanot 69 Rico & Michael Nudes text by Bill Kouwenhoven 89 Jacqueline Hassink The Table of Power 2 text by Matthias Harder 109 Martin Stöbich Wo nehmen wir nur jeden Tag aufs Neue diese Zuversicht her? text by Tim Clark 129 Maxime Ballesteros Arrhythmia text by Sean O'Toole

149 Larry Clark Jonathan Velasquez (no text) 169 Antoine d'Agata Anticorps text by Bernard Marcadé

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190 Photobooks

by Sebastian Hau 195 Foam ­Amsterdam Exhibition Programme 224 Colophon

Editorial

by Marloes Krijnen Editor-in-chief

kind of friction, while remaining true to the essential nature of Foam Magazine, unhindered by taboos, good taste or legal considerations. In essence, Foam Magazine exists to present, as effectively as possible, qualitatively outstanding and interesting photo­graphy. All this pro­ duced a degree of tension, but of course it was also a challenge we were eager to take on.

Visual stimuli are of great importance in arousing lust.

Someone or something is revealed to us, shown in a way that initiates a psychologically complex process that involves fantasy, craving, and an eagerness to eliminate the distance between ourselves and the object of our desire. Lust combined with photography can therefore produce a great deal of excitement.

Lastly, we are particularly proud of the interview with photographer Viviane Sassen, in which she talks about both her career as a fashion photographer and her autonomous work. The extraordinary self-portraits Viviane made specially for Foam Magazine are unique.

This is most certainly an issue with plenty of material to sate your appetites.

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Lust is an intense longing to have specific desires fulfilled. Those desires are usually sexual in nature, but lust can sometimes be directed towards other things, such as the acquisition of knowledge or the satisfaction of hunger or other appetites – we quite often speak of a lust for power. Nevertheless, lust usually has sexual connotations. It is a strong psychological urge that goes beyond love, passion or desire. Lust is irrational, unreasonable and excessive. It seems to arise from a deeper and much darker psychological need than sim­ ple desire and it is far harder to suppress. The intense urge to achieve satisfaction, or to seek out circumstances that increase the likelihood of satisfaction, is so strong that it often proves impossible to control. As a result, lust is dangerous. Moral considerations and ethical rules or prohibitions are subordinated to the basic compulsion to satisfy our lust.

Putting together eight portfolios on the subject of lust proved an electrifying experience. Since lust is amoral and irrational, we, as the editorial team, felt we should overstep certain boundaries in order to do justice to the essential characteristics of the theme. Decent and respectable choices made with an eye to what is gener­ ally morally or ethically acceptable would be inappro­ priate for this issue. The content needed to create a

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editorial

Although in the Christian tradition lust is regarded as one of the seven deadly sins, in our Western consumer society we are continually surrounded by images de­ signed to appeal to lustful feelings. Advertising makes eager use of images that have a powerful erotic charge.

Almost every product, from toothpaste to the latest make of car, seems to sell better if it is shown alongside sensual, scantily clad women or bronzed, muscular young men. These are objects of desire, and the inten­ tion is to arouse lust. They represent fantasies, promises of a different, ideal world in which there are no taboos, no need to exercise normal restraint.

In all modesty we think we have succeeded in creating an issue of Foam Magazine that does full justice to the theme Lust. Naturally we have included the work of old master Larry Clark, not from his iconic series Tulsa or Teenage Lust but instead a series of images, especially edited for Foam Magazine, that demonstrates his fas­ cination for the young Jonathan Velasquez. The youth­ ful duo Rico & Michael are masters too, in their case at playing on good taste and visual clichés. Their work is shameless, hedonistic and often excruciatingly funny.

The fact that lust is also associated with power justifies the inclusion of images from The Table of Power 2, the extremely precise portrayal of the settings of corporate power by Jacqueline Hassink. We are pleased to be able to present the unique work of Mao Ishikawa, a female photographer from Japan who concentrates on the complex relationship between young Japanese women and American soldiers on the island of Okinawa.

Martin Stöbich focuses on the semantics of contem­ porary pornography, melding word and image to create work that conceals as much as it reveals. Of an alto­ gether different order is the publication Terribly Awesome Photo Books, put together in newspaper format by Paul Kooiker and Erik Kessels, two insatiable collectors of extraordinary, strange or bizarre images. The pleasure they take in collecting and then combining their unique finds leaps from the pages. We could hardly leave out the world in its own right that is high fashion, with its desirable designs and often equally desirable models, and the debauchery of after-parties replete with hedon­ istic delights. Maxime Ballesteros takes us with him to give us a peek behind the scenes.

Portfolio Overview

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1. Mao Ishikawa Body Heat In order to to photograph the Kin-Town girls who worked in the bars that catered to the GIs from Camp Hansen in Okinawa, Ishikawa became a Kin-Town girl herself. The bar, popular with black American soldiers, became her home from 1975 to 1977 where she photographed every aspect of her life – the other girls, the soldiers who frequented the bar, the drinking, the sex, and the simple events of daily life.

3. Rico & Michael Nudes Central to the work of Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier is their engagement with the dramatization on individuality and personality, and with social milieus and their own image consciousness. Their artistic approach is not the one of a distanced authorship. The personal world of images in which the portrayed people move in their view as an adequate element. They also include themselves as models by working on prevalent forms of self-expression in various filmic and photographic self-portraits.

2. Paul Kooiker & Erik Kessels Terribly Awesome Photobooks With Terribly Awesome Photobook we are in the area of the so-called ‘found photography’, because without Kooiker and Kessels these books would probably have been forgotten about. The logic is the same as the readymades of Marcel Duchamp who was the first to realise that some things are wonderful only outside of their original context. The simple matching of pages from different books is the main procedure used for reworking their meanings, creating new and carefully calibrated combinations.

4. Jaqueline Hassink The Table of Power 2 In her large-scale photo project The Table of Power, Jacqueline Hassink has over many years linked together a series of rooms, closed to the public, in which global business deals of mind-boggling magnitude are negotiated. With this sequence, she has created a symbol of this power and, obliquely, the lust for power.

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5. Martin Stöbich Wo nehmen wir nur jeden Tag aufs Neue diese Zuversicht her?

Martin Stöbich appropriates stills from online pornographic videos and superimposes snippets of text onto them. Through this series, he has created a body of work that offers a refreshingly subversive take on the cultural modifications of sex and violates the conventions of the medium while forcing to rethink the potential double-entendre of everyday idioms.

7. Larry Clark Jonathan Velasquez

6. Maxime Ballesteros Arrhythmia When not producing his purposefully off-key fashion and social portraiture, Maxime Ballesteros devotes himself to making jaunty documentary photographs that describe a manmade world peopled by men and women devoted to fleeting pleasures – kissing, gambling, smoking, posing for a camera. It is one of the pleasures of youth to endure this devastation, to come through the slaughter of those endless nights, scarred but fundamentally intact.

8. Antoine d'Agata Anticorps The images in Anticorps are not representations but have been literally torn away. Snatched. Antoine d’Agata no more constructs an image than he composes it; rather he snatches it from the reality of his own existence. He has no time for form. His only concern is the form that materialises not through the camera but in life’s greatest intimacy; form that happens, that looms from deep within an event as it unfolds.

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portfolio overview

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Dutch artist Viviane Sassen creates enigmatic and spellbinding photographs compelling to both the art world and the fashion industry. On a spring day, she shared with Merel Bem stories about the creation of her latest series in a Surinamese village, her relation to Africa and her everlasting fascination for the magical powers of photography.

Interview with

by Merel Bem

It’s a Kind of Magic photographs by Viviane Sassen

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interview

Viviane Sassen

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Although it was frightening, that event turned out to be an important source of artistic inspiration in the years that followed. It is of course no accident that the skin of the Ghanaian woman in Rubedo was painted blood-red by Viviane Sassen three years later. The painting of parts of the body has since become an important element of her work, but in those days it was still new. She didn’t feel anxious about having the drama student from Accra pose like that. She did find it extremely important to explain to her exactly what she wanted to achieve by it. ‘I was working on a project about AIDS at the time. To me that red colour was a kind of spell.’ Fortunately the student understood her intentions and afterwards even took the trouble to explain to a group of distrustful fellow students what the photographer was trying to achieve with the photo.

‘And when she did, they thought it was fantastic.’

So an experience in the forests of Zambia seeps through into a photo from Ghana taken years la­ter, and eventually, much later still, into the images Sassen recently made in Surinam. Objects with a soul. Mysterious bits of string on the ground. Round shapes on a roof.

A wooden structure as an altar, not complete until a photo is taken of it. But also a portrait of a man with a remarkable face, a face covered in gleaming blue paint.

‘I still find photography a very magical medium. As far as that goes I understand those pregnant women who don’t want to be photographed. I also understand why a man could be so happy to have a photograph of his late grandmother. Photography is a miracle. That becomes very clear at such moments. And at the same time it’s a physical phenomenon that you can explain in plain terms. That combination – the most beautiful thing there is, isn’t it?’

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All images © Viviane Sassen Portrait (p.17) by Hanneke van Leeuwen, collage by Viviane Sassen Viviane Sassen (b. 1972, Amsterdam) was trained in fashion design and photography at Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht and Arnhem before receiving a master in Fine Arts from Ateliers Arnhem (1997). With her dreamy, bold and surrealist imagery, she has since pursued a career in both fields, gaining international recognition as a fashion photographer and as a visual artist.

In the fashion realm, she has contributed to publications such as I-D, Purple, Dazed & Confused, Vogue France and Another Magazine in addition to produce images for renowned brands’ campaigns like Miu Miu, Adidas, Diesel, Louis Vuitton and Carven.

Her personal work, animated by her relation to the African continent, has been exhibited internationally in several venues, among others: the Bal in Paris (2012), the Museum of Modern Art in NYC (2011), the Château d’Eau in Toulouse (2010), Danziger Projects in NYC (2010). It is also part of the collections of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris), the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Centre National des Art Plastiques (Paris).

Some of her monographs in­clude Roxane (Damien Poulain/Oode, 2012), Die Son Sien Alles (Librairyman, 2012), Parasomnia (Prestel, 2011) and Flamboya (Contrasto Books, 2008).

Sassen will be among the artists presented by curator Massimiliano Gioni’s group show The Encyclopedic Palace for the 55th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition to be opened in June 2013. She lives and works in Amsterdam and continues to extensively travel to Africa.

Merel Bem (b. 1977, Leiderdorp) graduated in Art History with a Master in Contemporary Art from the University of Amsterdam. She writes about photography and fashion for publications such as de Volkskrant, ELLE, Vrij Nederland and Kunstbeeld. From 2006-2010 she taught writing at the Photography Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She is also an advisor for the Dutch Mediafonds and regularly contributes to De Avonden, VPRO Radio. She lives and works in Haarlem, The Netherlands.

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foam magazine # 35 lust

Life r o f Lust

by Marcel Feil Last month the fifteenth Shanghai International Automobile Industry Exhibition took place, usually called Auto Shanghai for short. With its rapidly growing internal market, China is naturally of great importance to the international car industry, so all the big players attended, some bringing special versions of their top models: even faster, more powerful, and above all more spacious. That aside, it was like all other car shows, including the presence of the inevitable car-show girls.

Even in China, where the prevailing mores are rather different when it comes to overt displays of feminine beauty, scantily clad young ladies proved indispensable.

Almost every car had a girl to go with it, so the people who flooded in could gape not just at the different models of car but at some extremely seductive females. As ever, the women left little to the imagination. Towering stilettos, tiny dresses, push-up bras, pouting lips and sexy poses were standard features of their get-up. ›

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theme introduction

The latin word luxuria was used to express exuberance, excess, licentiousness and debauchery.

One of the Seven Deadly Sins, Lust is often connected with the act of looking – looking at an object of our desire, of our fantasy. The act of looking bridges the gap between us and the unattainable object of our lust.

The ultimate satisfaction of that desire would mean eliminating the distance and taking possession of the lust object, if only in the imagination.

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Mao Ishikawa Body Heat

Mao Ishikawa

by Marc Feustel Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, Araki, Keizo Kitajima – the list of photographers who have worked in Japan’s Okinawa prefecture, a group of sub-tropical islands to the southwest of mainland Japan, is long. Okinawa has become a kind of photographic rite of passage for Japanese photographers over the past fifty years and it is easy to understand why. Stretching out from the island of Kyushu all the way to Taiwan, this chain of islands is known for its extra­ ordinary natural beauty, which attracts many. Others are interested in the vibrant culture and traditions of the region, which are so different from those of mainland Japan. But the biggest draw for photographers has been Okinawa’s relationship with the United States and the significant continued US military presence since the Second World War. However, unlike most of the photographers who have worked in the region, Mao Ishikawa was born and raised in Okinawa and has devoted her photographic career to her native islands.

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portfolio text

Photographs from the heart

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Born in 1953, Mao Ishikawa began photography while she was still a high school student, and soon encountered the Japanese photography scene. After graduating from high school she accompanied a group of student activists to Tokyo in 1972. While in the capital she found out about the WORKSHOP photo­graphy school where some of the most important names in photography including Masahisa Fukase, Araki, Daido Moriyama and Shomei Tomatsu were teaching. She studied briefly with Tomatsu before returning to Okinawa.

These were particularly turbulent years for the region. From 1965 to 1972 the US military bases in Okinawa had been of major strategic importance in the aerial bombing of North Vietnam; the air bases in Okinawa became a lightning rod for anti-war sentiment as well as for the strong independence movement that had developed in opposition to Okinawa’s reversion to Japan. The military bases, the most visible manifestation of the US occupation, were the target of the independence protesters. Ishikawa was involved in the protests and was particularly affected by an incident that occurred in front of her when demonstrators threw a Molotov cocktail that killed a riot policeman. Despite the significance of the protests that took place in both Okinawa and mainland Japan, the Japanese government negotiated the reversion of Okinawa from the United States to Japan in 1972, agreeing to allow the Americans to maintain a significant military presence on the islands that has continued until the present day. Indeed, it is worth pointing out the extent to which these bases still dominate the Okinawan landscape: 18% of the land on the main island is occupied by 14 US military bases,

which house two-thirds of the 40,000 American troops still stationed in Japan.

It was in this extremely complicated social and political context that Ishikawa found the subject of her first body of work. She decided to photograph the Kin-Town girls who worked in the bars that catered to the GIs from Camp Hansen (the name of the base located in Kin-Town). In order to do this, Ishikawa took the most obvious step possible, but one which few photographers would have taken: she became a Kin-Town girl herself, finding a bar to work in through an acquaintance. The racial tension caused by the civil rights movement in the United States at the time meant that the GI bars tended to cater either for white or black soldiers to avoid any violence breaking out. The bar that became Ishikawa’s home from 1975 to 1977 was frequented by black soldiers. She became very close to many of them during this time and began to admire their struggle for civil rights and its parallels with the fight for Okinawan independence. Over the course of these two years she photographed every aspect of her life ­– the other girls, the soldiers who frequented the bar, the drinking, the sex, and the simple events of daily life.

→ Naha, Okinawa, 1979. From the series Sachiko Nakada’s Theater Company (1977-1991) ↗ Philadelphia, 1986. From the series Life in Philly

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I started taking photos by involving myself in the situation.

It is not only a documentary but also my own emotional record.

In fact that investment went far beyond the two years during which Ishikawa worked as a bar girl: it became a permanent part of her life and led to further projects. Myron Carr, one of the GIs with whom she became extremely close – they referred to each other as brother and sister – later invited her to come and stay with him and his twin brother in a dif ­fi cult black neighborhood in Philadelphia. Over a period of two months Ishikawa, who had never been to America before, took photographs every day resulting in the series Life in Philly (1986). Although she was in a completely alien environment for a relatively short period of time, these images share the same quality as those that she took on her native island: they are the photographs of an insider.

Beyond their subject matter, the most striking aspect of the photographs that Ishikawa took during her time as a bar girl is their honesty and openness. These images deal with difficult subjects: the relationship between the US and Japan, the oppression of the US military presence, the racial tension between black and white soldiers, and of course with sex.

While all of these elements are present in Mao Ishikawa’s work, she is clearly driven above all by her love for and interest in people. The overriding feelings that emanate from these images are exuberance,

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mao ishikawa

Ishikawa explains the work that she did during this time thus, ‘This is not an infiltration report (…) I am neither a magazine photographer nor a photojournalist.

I started taking photos by involving myself in the situation. It is not only a documentary but also my own emotional record.’1 Although her black-and-white pictures are reminiscent of the language of photojournalism or of documentary photography, in many ways they could not be further from these practices. Her work was also far less stylized than that of the photographers she would have encountered at the WORKSHOP school such as Fukase or Moriyama. Her images have a rough, raw aesthetic that privileges directness over symbolism or atmosphere. However, while she did not share their visual language, it is in the way that she invested herself so profoundly in her subject that echoes their work and in particular where the influence of Shomei Tomatsu can be felt. In an essay on Ishikawa, Tomatsu writes that she ‘lives on the polar opposite of the illusion of objectivity.’ He clearly had great admiration for the personal commitment that is evident in Ishikawa’s photographs.

Rather than a tool for documenting some detached, objective truth about the world around her, Ishikawa used photog­ raphy as a way of investing herself fully into the world she decided to photograph.

Ishikawa used photography as a way of investing herself fully into the world she decided to photograph.

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openness and freedom. Although there is an erotic quality to her images of sex and of naked bodies, they are not romanticized, they celebrate it for what it is, warts and all. They are not analytical photographs that aim to deconstruct the complex social forces at play in Okinawa, but rather to celebrate the subjects that they depict. They are photo­ graphs taken with the heart and not with the head.

The series of photographs from this period eventually became a book entitled Atsuki Hibi ni Camp Hansen (Hot Days in Camp Hansen) published in 1982. In many ways it is extraordinary that this book was ever produced. This was Ishikawa’s first project and at the time photography in Japan was very much a male-dominated, Tokyo-centric world.

Furthermore convincing a publisher to publish a book with such controversial subject matter cannot have been easy.

The book is split into two sections: the first consisting of photographs taken by Ishikawa and the second is made up of photographs of her, including images of her having sex with her lovers. This structure gives the book the quality of a personal photo-journal and highlights how deeply committed she was to this project. Unfortunately, the reception that it received was more predictable.

Although it attracted a significant amount of media attention, much of it was critical, railing against the sex and debauchery that it portrays so freely.

Ishikawa was unprepared for the extent

of the fallout. Ishikawa’s husband, whom she married in 1978, had objected to the publication and it resulted in the end of their marriage. Some of the women featured in these photographs had created new lives and objected to this frank portrayal of that time, suing her for violation of their privacy. In an effort to put things right, Ishikawa gave the women the negatives of the images to destroy and then withdrew the book from circulation. For years she effectively buried the project due to all the harm it had caused and the way it had been misrepresented in the media.

On New Year’s Eve of 2010, Ishikawa’s daughter urged her to go through the contents of some cardboard boxes that had remained untouched for years.

When she opened them, she found several hundred prints that she had made for the book Hot Days in Camp Hansen, which she had thought must have been lost. The discovery of these prints gave Ishikawa the desire to bring this project to light again and a new edit of the work Hot Days in Okinawa was recently published by Foil in Japan alongside an exhibition of some of the original prints at the Yokohama Civic Art Gallery Azamino.

Although thirty years have passed since Hot Days in Camp Hansen was first published, it has lost none of its power and youthful energy, and perhaps today it is finally finding the audience it deserves. • 1. Ishikawa, Mao. Fences. Okinawa: 2010, p.148

All images © Mao Ishikawa Mao Ishikawa (b. 1953, Okinawa) studied photography at the Shomei Tomatsu Photographic Workshop and has since extensively exhibited her work in Japan and abroad. Mostly inspired by the life and inhabitants of Okinawa, her photographs blur the boundaries between documentary and autobiography. She has published several books including Atsuki Hibi ni Camp Hansen (Hot Days in Camp Hansen, 1982), Minatomachi Elegy (Port Town Elegy, 1990), Sachiko Nakada Ikko Monogatari (Sachiko Nakada’s Theater Company, 1995), Life in Philly (2010) and Hot Days in Okinawa (2013). She lives and works in Tomigusuku City, Okinawa.

Marc Feustel (b. 1978, London) is the creator and editor of eyecurious.com, a blog dedicated to photography. He has curated several exhibitions as creative director of Studio Equis. A specialist in Japanese photography, he is the author of Japan: a self-portrait, photographs 1945-1964 (Paris: Flammarion, 2004). His texts also appeared in publications such as The Photobook Review, American Photo, and FANTOM magazine. Feustel lives and work in Paris.

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Paul Kooiker & Erik Kessels Terribly Awesome Photobooks

Paul Kooiker & Erik Kessels

portfolio text

Terribly Mistake-Ridden Text

by Francesco Zanot THE FIRST MISTAKE As Bukowski wrote, ‘It began as a mistake’1. In fact, one shouldn’t start an article by citing the description of the subject matter just as it appears on the publisher’s website, but as it perfectly summarizes the content of Terribly Awesome Photobooks, it precludes the need to give any further details:

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audience. I am of course referring to a category of books about photography books, the foundations of which are the publications by Andrew Roth and by the co-authors Martin Parr and Gerry Badger followed by numerous studies carried out on a geographical, chronological and theme basis.

Some things are wonderful only outside their original context.

‘For several years, Paul Kooiker and Erik Kessels have organized evenings for friends in which they share the strangest photo books in their collections. The books shown are rarely available in regular shops, but are picked up in thrift stores and from antiquaries. The group’s fascination for these pictorial non-fiction books comes from the need to find images that exist on the fringe of regular commercial photo books. It’s only in this area that it’s possible to find images with an uncontrived quality. What’s noticeable from these publications is that there’s a thin line between being terrible and being awesome. This constant tension makes the books interesting. It’s also worth noting that these tomes all fall within certain categories: the medical, instructional, scientific, sex, humour or propaganda.

Paul Kooiker and Erik Kessels have made a selection of their finest books from within this questionable new genre.’

So now both subject matter and process have been understood. Next, the cue to continue comes from this last sentence.

The fact is that this book too is part of a new publishing genre that has been growing appreciably over the last few years and catching the interest of a wide

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Books, on the other hand, have always been the main distribution channel for photography. Their seamless integration is determined by at least two factors.

First, compared to other visual art products, such as painting, sculpture, cinema etc. photographs published in a book give one the impression of getting closer to the originals. Many photographers, for this reason, are obsessed with and try in vain to attain an exact copy of their prints disregarding the fact that there are inherent differences in quality between the two media. It is as if to expect Moriyama’s Stray Dog to start barking. Secondly, the serial and repetitive nature of photography (try asking a photographer to take a portrait photo of you: he’ll take at least ten pictures) is consistent with book publishing, no matter what kind of narrative or anti-narrative techniques you’re applying. So, for many photographers, the notion of a book has greatly superseded that of being a mere container for images, taking on the appearance of an authentic work that possesses both independence and specificity. The studies cited above have used this evidence and established some criteria for assessing excellence (the first of which is the forming of a group in which the quality of the photographs corresponds to that of the graphics, text, sequence and materials) starting a real trend that has involved many participants: historians and curators are increasingly interested in photography books, writing essays and holding exhibitions on the subject; photographers have intensified their editorial works and there has been an explosion in the area of self-publishing; the number of specialist collectors has increased dramatically as has the economic size of the sector, leading to speculation on the most sought-after works. In a London pub, at the end of 2012, Badger told me about several booksellers who tried to cheat him by increasing the prices of the books he was trying to buy, certain that just by including a book in his list of favourites would lead to an increase its price. The dog turned on its master.

Compared to the previous publications, TAP presents a two-fold change in perspective. First the authors don’t make

their choices on the basis of a qualitative criteria but favour everything that deviates furthest from normality. In practice, instead of making a selection of the best books, they bet on the most unconventional ones. They also turn their attention beyond specific photographic research, mainly collecting material made for purposes other than artistic expression. We are in the area of the so-called ‘found photography’ because without Kooiker and Kessels these books would probably have been forgotten. The logic is the same as the readymades of Marcel Duchamp who was the first to realise that some things are wonderful only outside their original context.

THE SECOND MISTAKE

Woman Ajar, by Marcel Mariën and Gibt es Sex nach dem Tode? by Rosa von Praunheim are books by the only internationally known visual artists. The former is an eclectic surrealist and the latter a film director and gay activist. Both are the expression of maximum possible freedom in their respective themes: the female nude and death. The Children We Remember by Chana Byers Abells, offers itself as an aid to inform adolescents about the tragedy of the holocaust. Op Zoek, by Hans Plomp and Jean-Paul Vroom, is a special experiment on the structure of photo love stories (photoromances were a fundamental solace for bored women and young lusty guys) made with existing images that bear no relationship to one another. The Wonder of Innocence, by Gina Lollobrigida is a

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Most of those presented here are not photography books, but books containing photographs.

paul kooiker & erik kessels

One should never write about something one doesn’t know about, but the truth is that before reading TAP I had only heard about six of the forty books that appear in it. I hope the reason for this failing can’t be attributed to sudden amnesia or worse still, unjustifiable incompetence, but because they belong to areas that I’m not normally involved with. A brief explanation for this is that most of those

presented here are not photography books, but books containing photographs. The images serve to illustrate the most disparate subjects from the forms of clouds to collecting Japanese dolls, from hunting rifles to refined techniques for painting one’s cat. However, the short list of the six books known to me is probably sufficient to have an idea of the work carried out by Kooiker and Kessels.

typical example of accidents that can happen when a well-known actor ­decides to devote himself to photography. Noi amiamo Silvio is a grotesque hagiography about Silvio Berlusconi that presents a complex web of disguises which makes it difficult to distinguish what has been distorted in reality (certainly the Prime Minister’s hair and complexion) from subsequent digital modifications.

Whilst I just know about the book Breasts,

by Daphna Ayalah and Isaac J. Weinstock I know Noi amiamo Silvio very well because it was distributed via newsagents in Italy, including my local one.

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THE THIRD MISTAKE Up till now I have considered this work in the same way as I would a survey about photography books. This is incorrect, or rather, TAP, in part, performs a similar function by identifying a series of noteworthy publications, but replaces the didactic approach of the criticalhistorical studies by editing and overwriting. It’s not based on an investigation into the starting materials, but rather the exploitation of them in order to obtain, via a circuitous route that brings you back to the first part of this article, an additional and independent work with respect to its single components.

Beyond the content of the books that TAP gathers together, it questions some transversal issues that develop in different directions. It’s a privileged field in which you can practise a dialectic between concealment and surprise, implicit in photography. It allows its readers to test the principles underlying the choice of a sequence of images that can actually be disassembled (the pages aren’t bound) and reassembled in a different order until it becomes transformed into a rudimentary exhibition.

(Art Paper claims to be an ‘independent publishing platform... that focuses on the book as an exhibition space’). Lastly, it sets aside any interest towards the more conventional forms of beauty in order to reconstruct a series of new samples starting from that which is apparently more disharmonious, conventional and even vulgar, but also more popular because of that. Nietzsche wrote: ‘Bad taste has its right just as good taste does – and even a prior right if it answers to a great need, provides guaranteed satisfaction and as it were a universal language, an unconditionally intelligible mask and gesture; good,

The simple matching of pages from different books (each is selected and reproduced in a single spread) is the main procedure used for reworking their meanings, creating new and carefully calibrated combinations. Going back to a couple of previous examples, the breasts in ‘Breasts’ are associated with pictures of chimneypots which evidently denote a protuberant shape, whilst Silvio Berlusconi, sitting in a helicopter, seems to direct his eyes towards a semi-naked woman intent on doing gymnastics, thereby triggering the suspicion of an imminent bunga bunga party.

refined taste, on the contrary, is always somewhat searching, deliberate, not altogether sure how it is to be understood: it is not and never was popular!’2. Paul Kooiker and Erik Kessels work at a philosophical level by adapting an original scale of ethical and aesthetic values to their own needs.

They are more effective than the witches in Macbeth (‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’3, they state in chorus at the beginning of the play, introducing the adventures of the ‘luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful, sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin’ protagonist) and they succeed where Photoshop and cosmetics have failed: TAP makes a portrait of Silvio Berlusconi look awesome.

• 1. Bukowski, Charles. Post Office. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971.

2. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science: with a prelude in German rhymes and an appendix of songs (Fröliche Wissenschaft). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, § 77, p. 78.

3. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. New York: Dover Publications, 1993.

All images from Terribly Awesome Photobooks © Paul Kooiker & Erik Kessels, published by Art Paper Editions, 2012.

Paul Kooiker (b. 1964, Rotterdam) studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His work, mostly related to the act of looking and to voyeurism, has been exhibited widely and received the Prix de Rome in 1996 and the A. Roland Holst Prize in 2009. Since 1995, he is teaching photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where he lives and works.

Erik Kessels (b. 1966, Roermond) has published several books on vernacular photography in addition to his contribution as an editor for the alternative magazine Useful Photography. He has curated exhibitions such as Dutch Delight (2001) and Album Beauty (2012) at Foam, and co-curated the New York Photo Festival (2010) and From Here On at the Rencontres d’Arles (2011). Erik Kessels is also the co-founder and creative director of KesselsKramer, an inter­ national communications agency based in Amsterdam and in London.

Francesco Zanot (b. Milan, 1979) has curated exhibitions and monographs about many renowned international artists, such as Alec Soth, Takashi Homma, Charlotte Dumas, Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi and Olivo Barbieri. His new book Alec Soth: Ping Pong Conversations, will be published by Contrasto in 2013. Director of the Master in Photography and Visual Design at Forma Fondazione per la Fotografia, Milan, he is also associate editor of Fantom – Photographic Quarterly.

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Rico & Michael Nudes

Rico & Michael

portfolio text

Not So Simple Men

by Bill Kouwenhoven In ‘Notes on Camp’, Susan Sontag’s famous essay from Against Interpretation, she lays out a few ground rules about the nature of Camp as a phenomenon: 1. To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized – or at least apolitical.

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3. While there is a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at things, Camp is also a quality discoverable in objects and in the behaviour of individuals. There are campy movies, clothes, furniture, popular songs, novels, people, buildings. This distinction is important. True, the Camp eye has the power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Camp. It’s not all in the eye of the beholder.

7. The Camp eye has the power to transform experience.

8. Camp is a vision of the world in terms of a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off’ of thingsbeing-what-they-are-not.

9. As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated. Andro­ gyny is one of the great images of Camp sensibility. Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractive­ness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one’s sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. Allied to the Camp taste for the androgynous is something that seems quite different but isn’t: a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms.

25.The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance.

Sontag goes on to cite a variety of objects, movies, operas, and so on, but always returns to a notion of transforming experience and exuberant exaggeration in its approach, among other things, to masculinity. It makes one wonder what she would make of the latest project, Diary 2, by the young Swiss duo, Rico & Michael, aka Rico Scagliola and Michael Meier, born a generation after the publication in 1964 of Sontag’s groundbreaking essay.

In the fifty years since, the critical world has been turned on its head very many over times with the rise and fall from favour of Feminism, Deconstruction, Critical Theory, Queer Studies, PostFeminism, Post-Porn Feminism, and others that have greatly opened up the space for discussion of how we go about our lives and how we think about them and their representation. The evolution, or mash-up, of these styles of thought has been paralleled by the shattering of stereotypes of gender roles and lifestyle choices. Today’s world has become far less square, Rico & Michael might use the German word bieder, and the ways people can express themselves have been greatly extended.Yet even as young people rebel against conformity and set out to find their own tribe or family with their own likes and dislikes, other modes of expression can still cause the conun-

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drums raised by Camp and its messing around with, and transgression of, gender.

With their gloriously splashy nude selfportraits, Rico & Michael leap into the fray around what it means to be male in today’s world. They were drawn to people who touched the boundaries of self-expression and perhaps burst through into some new space. In an interview they1 note: ‘We are very interested in all kinds of people but mostly in people who have had some sort of exaggerated style of selfexpression since they were born. We always want to adopt some sort of view

I wanted to show the Zeitgeist.

↖ →

SOI Stills #28 © Rico & Micheal RiRi © Rico & Micheal

Can men strike the same poses as women do in advertising?

After meeting at art school in Zürich, they undertook a combined project on kids that proved to be the spark for Diary: ‘We did a book called Neue Menschen about some kids over a period of three years or so, and took so many pictures of them that we started taking pictures of ourselves. It was relaxing and fun. That’s when we started making nude self-portraits. We were sort of infected by the pleasure the kids had in having their pictures taken. That’s pretty much how this project started.’

The pictures in Diary are gloriously silly and serious at the same time. They are male nudes showing pumped-up bodies,

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the result of working out a lot, and they show a variety of settings and poses.

Some images, of a naked back draped on a ledge echoed by the undulations of mountains, for instance, are more conventional and reflect classic images by innumerable fashion photographers. A picture of a man on a balcony in a bodybuilder’s pose could be an homage to Herb Ritts. Other compositions, however, explore what it means to photograph men in exaggerated, stylized poses more reminiscent of Juergen Teller or David LaChapelle. The figures are always fully centered and staring directly back at the camera, whether in the back of a pimpedup limousine or on a table in a boat, or more confrontationally, on a beach holding a large rock in front of their genitals.

These pictures investigate what it means to be a male and how males are seen, especially as they invert stereotypical images. Rico & Michael clearly want to make us think about what it is all about.

‘It’s about male erotica, obviously. People out on the streets still seem to think it is funny to see a man who is sexy. There is still a kind of discussion about whether a man can be beautiful and desirable and sexy. Can men strike the same poses as women do in advertising? We are male, and we work out a lot. That may seem a little feminine, and people are not

rico & michael

they have of themselves. We don’t want to be at a distance or to be the authors who tell them what to do all the time. We want to integrate their view into our pictures. It’s always an assimilation of both them and us. We really want to dive into their worlds. ‘Whenever we wanted to do some project on, say, what are called urban tribes, I paid attention to the surface.

We find clothes are very important. But I wanted to incorporate their views on life. I wanted to show the Zeitgeist.’

The kids in Michael Meier’s Landstrasse work predated his cooperation with his artistic partner, but became part of their very direct approach to photography. He says, ‘In a way it fits in because it takes a very direct, harsh look at a certain milieu.

That’s how we view things. We don’t shy away from pictures that might be ugly, and we’re not afraid to point the camera directly at the people we photograph.’

Similarly, Rico Scagliola embarked on an exploration of a pleasure garden at an amuse­ment park on the shores of Lake Constance: ‘a somewhat kitschy work about the place and its people and an attempt to look into their minds.’

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exactly comfortable with it. They think what we do is cool, but they are affected in a way they find slightly embarrassing.

It’s as though they’re a bit afraid. They feel guilty about the way they respond to the pictures. It’s also confusing for women. It’s not confusing for gay men. It’s comical. We don’t do it just to look gay.

We’re always happy when people see beyond the gay theme.’

What marks out their collective work is the melding of minds and styles with a very direct, full-frontal approach to photography. The poses, the styles, and all of the exaggerated trappings would fit Sontag’s notion of Camp, of course, but there is something else going on behind all of this play. It is not all about the look. It is not at all burlesquing around.

‘We have become very interested in exploring masculinity. Masculinity means you are strong, you are powerful, you have a strong body, and we express that through the attributes of our own bodies. Sometimes when you are a man and you feel good, you like to show off your body. If you go ahead and do that, then people think you’re ridiculous or they think you’re gay.’

In her preface to ‘Notes on Camp’, Susan Sontag cites Oscar Wilde in Phrases & Philosophies for the Use of the Young: ‘One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.’ This seems appropriate, especially when the body of work at hand here in Diary is about the body, and the body unclothed. One might also come up with some music to contemplate while viewing these images. Rico & Michael have a few ideas for their soundtrack: Rammstein, Trust, Goth music, Fad Gadget, Strauss, Wagner. This is a nice mash-up, but I keep thinking of another artist provocateur who challenged gender issues and what it means to be a man, the late, great Klaus Nomi, whose Nomi Song is as spot-on as his ironic Simple Man. Rico & Michael prove – lustfully and laughingly, yet dead seriously – that nobody is simple any more.

• 1. Unless otherwise indicated I am using I and we interchangeably although most of the words spoken are by Rico and from a Skype interview conducted 14.5.13.

2. The Nudes portfolio is part of the larger body of work called Diary (N.d.r.).

Incidentally, their work can also be considered a criticism along the lines of John Waters movies such as Pink Flamingos or Polyester! or something from David Lynch’s oeuvre. Both filmmakers concentrate on conformity and suburbia, and Rico and Michael are huge fans of them both. They also point out that John Waters’s Baltimore had a lot in common with the Switzerland of their youth. They reveal how difficult it can be to be different and to find a means of expression through art and life that will make sense of you and how you are perceived by others.

All images © Rico & Michael Rico & Michael is a photographic tandem, founded in 2008 by Rico Scagliola (b. 1985, Zurich) and Michael Meier (b. 1982, Chur). Since its inception, the duo based in Zurich has developed a photo and video based practice wich deals with the notions of individuality and personality through dramatization and self-reprensentation.

In 2011, a compilation of their work, Neue Menschen, was published

by Patrick Frey Editions and in 2012, their show Double Extension Beauty Tubes was presented at Foam. Their latest project, Sons of Imago, is a long-term video project which takes the format of a made-for-TV drama series with a fictive storyline.

Bill Kouwenhoven is the International Editor of HotShoe magazine and a frequent contributor to numerous other contemporary photography journals in the United States, England and Europe including Afterimage, Aperture, British Journal of Photography, Foto 8, Photonews, Foto, European Photography, and Camera Austria.

He is the author of several monographs and the major survey of Contemporary Spanish Photography and Video, Nuevas Historias.

He lives and works in Berlin and New York.

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Jacqueline Hassink The Table of Power 2

The meeting tables of the board of directors Assicurazioni Generali S.p.A., Venice (IT) Carrefour S.A., Levallois-Perret (FR) Deutsche Telekom AG, Bonn (DE) UniCredit S.p.A., Milan (IT) Fiat S.p.A., Turin (IT) Total S.A., Paris, (FR) Société Générale S.A., Paris (FR) Enel S.p.A., Rome (IT) StatoilHydro A.S.A., Oslo (NO) Siemens AG, Munich (DE) GDF SUEZ S.A., Courbevoie (FR) Royal Dutch Shell p.l.c., The Hague (NL) ArcelorMittal S.A., Luxembourg (LU) BNP Paribas S.A., Paris (FR) BP p.l.c., London (UK) Not featured (in alphabetical order): Allianz SE, Munich (DE) Banco Santander S.A., Madrid (ES) Banco Santander S.A., Santander (ES) BASF SE, Ludwigshafen (DE) Dexia S.A. / N.V., Brussels (BE) E.ON AG, Düsseldorf (DE) Eni S.p.A., Rome (IT) ING Group N.V., Amsterdam (NL) LUKOIL, Moscow (RU) METRO AG, Düsseldorf (DE) PSA Peugeot Citroën S.A., Paris (FR) Repsol YPF S.A., Madrid (ES) The Royal Bank of Scotland Group p.l.c., Edinburgh (UK) Telefónica S.A., Madrid (ES) ThyssenKrupp AG, Essen (DE) Volkswagen AG, Wolfsburg (DE)

THE Table of power 2: DENIED ACCESS TO PHOTOGRAPH AXA S.A., Paris (FR) Crédit Agricole S.A., Paris (FR) Daimler AG, Stuttgart (DE) Deutsche Bank AG, Frankfurt am Main (DE) Deutsche Post AG, Bonn (DE) Électricité de France S.A., Paris (FR) Gazprom, Moscow (RU) HSBC Holdings p.l.c., London (UK) Nestlé S.A., Vevey (CH) The Royal Bank of Scotland p.l.c., Edinburgh (UK) Tesco p.l.c, Cheshunt (UK)

Jacqueline Hassink

portfolio text

Lust for Power.

Large, Empty Tables as Power Symbols

by Matthias Harder Can empty rooms emanate power? Do empty, oversized tables and leather chairs reflect the huge influence of the CEOs and executives who occupy them doing meetings? Not really. But in her largescale photo project The Table of Power, Jacqueline Hassink has over many years linked together a series of rooms in which global – and hopefully morally acceptable – business deals of mind-boggling magnitude are negotiated. With this sequence, she has created a symbol of this power and, obliquely, the lust for power.

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It is a well-known fact that national economies and international business relationships are subject to considerable fluctuations, depending on major or minor economic crises. Everything is in a permanent state of flux and change, including companies in all business sectors, as manifests itself in such inflationary terms as ‘reorientation’ and ‘restructuring’. You can be at the top of the heap today and have fallen by the economic wayside tomorrow, whether you are small fry or a big fish – sometimes even when you’re an executive. Who exactly these people are who take place on these chairs and armchairs before or after the photo shoot, is almost irrelevant. The men in such posts – and they are predominantly men – will typically occupy these chairs during several years, raking in six-figure salaries. They develop a kind of Teflon coating that repels everything, and they set up, and rule over, a well-functioning network within and outside the company. To us, however, their power is very often all but invisible at first – or even second – glance; in fact, we wouldn’t even recognise many of them as powerful people, as in most cases we can’t put names to faces, and because they tend to stay in the background. The job of managing director, who represents the company to the outside world, is the most influential and best-paid and therefore most soughtafter in managerial circles.

Jacqueline Hassink deliberately omits the physical presence of the executive directors in her photographs. She has found an intelligent and subtle way of giving visual form to the permanent change in company management: the empty tables of power, whose occupants may or may not soon be replaced. But above all, the shots of the unoccupied rooms are individualised by small hints we have to look for, or which trip us up visually: an indefinable object adorning the huge table; a surprising number of visitors’ chairs – or, conversely, their complete absence; strangely low ceilings in many of the rooms; monitors hanging on the walls in one photo, abstract paintings in another. No two rooms are alike, and every detail reveals something about the self-image of these global players, the internal communication between them and their informal or hierarchically organised contact with one another. While searching for hidden clues is fun, few viewers would want to find themselves in the interiors – only a very small elite crave the kick of sitting at such a table as a policy maker.

Besides the board of directors, German joint-stock or capital companies usually have a supervisory board, a panel to which even union members are admitted. But in many other European countries, all the power is held by a single board, the so-called Board of Directors, in a monistic system that allows for hardly any outside supervision. In consequence, the tables at UniCredit in Milan or Total in Paris depicted here are so long, that many of those present at a meeting won’t even be able to make out each other’s faces. At ThyssenKrupp AG in Essen, Germany, on the other hand, all the key strategic decisions are taken in a plain room, at a small table that seats only eight people. This apparent modesty may, at a closer look, turn out to be all the more elitist.

← Toyota girl 1, Frankfurt © Jacqueline Hassink → Maserati girl 3, Frankfurt © Jacqueline Hassink

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Can empty rooms emanate power?

Can rooms like that be erotically arousing?

would convince us – for instance, by mentally transferring the executive meeting table of the former Dresdner Bank to the Société Generale in Paris. This mental experiment works surprisingly well, which completely contradicts the supposedly so characteristic corporate design of the different companies. The executive table of the Dutch financial service provider ING sports little flags with the company logo on them, as if the managers sitting at it needed to be reminded which company they work for; at Lukoil in Moscow, the company’s name is written on the wall in giant letters. Even though Hassink bases her series on the well-known list of the 500 most successful businesses and corporations worldwide, most of us have only a vague idea of what exactly many of these companies make all that money with.

Today’s international finance system can only be understood by a handful of political economists, and price-fixing between rival businesses on the global market, though prohibited, is the order of the day. The legal framework as well as clear control mechanisms for the economy, and therefore for companies, may be determined by a country’s politics and local customs, but the economic power of the Western world effectively lies in the hands of a few CEOs. The photography project goes back to the year 1993. Hassink, who trained as a sculptress, first experimented with pinning down and categorising our modern society in photos of tables during a workshop in Oslo. She was initially interested in four areas: ‘the table of power’, ‘the table of family’, ‘the table of justice’ and ‘the table of heaven’, and their different functions and purposes.

Over time, she became increasingly fascinated with the The Table of Power project, and took many photographs in the boardrooms of multinational companies such as Unilever in Rotterdam, Daimler in Stuttgart and Nestlé in Vevey between 1993 and 1995.

‘What has the greatest value in our modern, capitalist-oriented world?’ the artist asks, and answers her own question: economic power. While military deterrence managed – by sheer horror – to keep the world in balance several decades ago, trade agreements and free trade areas have at least as much global importance for nations today – and for the company based in them – as their military and strategic status. Furthermore, the balance of power between national and private industry is constantly shifting.

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jacqueline hassink

Travelling all over Europe, Jacqueline Hassink has made portraits of companies in the financial and insurance sectors, as well as the oil and car industries, based on the aesthetic appeal of their meeting rooms – which, despite being closed to the public, are highly representative. It is the first time a photographer has realised such a project. The interior style of many of these companies, who turn over billions and make millions, may come as a surprise to the outsider viewing the photographs – we are free, however, to let our imagination fill the empty rooms. It is easy to imagine a meeting of global players, for instance; the bluster and bravado with which they conduct negotiations and the cordially polite enmity between them. Of course, given that 99.99% of the world’s population have never attended such a meeting, images like these stem from – or are influenced by – Hollywood films. We could take our contemplation a step further, playing with the attributions and hence with the pictures’ visual contexts, and consider whether a different, random combination of table and company

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When the Lehman collapse led to the global credit crunch in 2008, Jacqueline Hassink revived her plan of portraying companies through their executive meeting rooms. Of course, the design and technical facilities of these rooms having changed enormously in the meantime, this second series (The Table of Power 2) is also something of a study on the changed spirit of the times. Not all companies are represented again – some didn’t agree to another shooting, and others, whom Hassink had photographed only in the mid-90s, were replaced by competitors whose turnover had skyrocketed. In her second publication, she publishes these rejections by printing them verbatim on a doublepage spread, together with an empty space where the interior would have been – a fascinatingly radical gesture.

The continuation of the project is consistent and in keeping with her precise sociological research.

but as a decorative extra. Hassink exposes this strange spectacle, still commonplace today. In another photo project, which plays with the power of femininity, elegance and luxury, she depicts ‘haute couture fitting rooms’ in Parisian shops including Ungaro, Givenchy and Scherrer. Here, too, the longing and desire (for possessions and recognition) aroused by the sales rooms as well as the photographs might easily be labelled pure lust.

•

Jacqueline Hassink arranges each shoot by sending a formal request to the company’s public relations office, and attaches a questionnaire in which she asks, for instance, who exactly is on the supervisory board or board of directors, how often they meet, who chose the table, whether it was specially manufactured and from what material. The project is accompanied by drawings made on location by the photographer, as well as detailed footage captured on a smartphone.

Can rooms like that be erotically arousing? Power may equal sex for some ­people, but it would take quite a stretch of the imagination to make this apply to this simple kind of interior photography.

Sensuality and eroticism do play a vital part in Hassink’s other large-scale project, the Car Girls series, for which she visited car shows in America, Japan and Europe. Here, she explores the downright traditional combination of pretty woman and brand-new car. The seductiveness of this combination – to the male gaze, at least – is subtle sometimes, obvious at others; similar to fashion photography. The women are not employed by Nissan, Ferrari or Chrysler as competent advisers or specialised saleswomen,

All images © Jacqueline Hassink Jacqueline Hassink (b. 1966, NL) is a visual artist well known for her global projects related to economic power. Her work has been widely collected, exhibited and published and has been recognized by various awards such as Prix No Limit from the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France (2002). She was also more recently shortlisted for the Dutch Doc Award 2013. In addition to her production, she gives lectures in several institutions such as Harvard University in Cambridge and the International Center for Photography in New York City where she lives and works .

Matthias Harder (b. 1965, Kiel) is chief curator at the Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin, and has curated exhibitions for the following institutions: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Kunsthalle zu Kiel; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Städel Museum, Frankfurt; Glyptothek, Munich; Fundació La Caixa, Barcelona; IVAM, Valencia; Tokyo Art Museum; Goethe-Institut.

He also teaches at the Freie Universität in Berlin, where he lives and works. As a writer, he regularly contributes to book publications, exhibition catalogues and magazines.

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Martin Stรถbich Wo nehmen wir nur jeden Tag aufs Neue diese Zuversicht her?

Martin Stöbich

portfolio text

Readymade Romance

by Tim Clark ‘Romance is maybe not yet totally dead, but its forthcoming death is signalled by object-gadgets which promise to deliver excessive pleasure but which effectively reproduce only the lack itself.’ So wrote Slavoj Žižek of Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London, during a panel discussion hosted by The Guardian entitled ‘Is romance dead?’ that took place on Valentine’s Day earlier this year.

Wondering whether modern living has killed off our emotional instincts, he expanded on his initial comment by discussing the latest fashion: the Stamina Training Unit, a counterpart to the vi-

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brator that is a masturbatory device into which the user inserts his erect penis. He then pushes the button and the object vibrates until the point of satisfaction.

Said Žižek: ‘The product is available in different colours, levels of tightness and forms (hairy or without hair, etc) that imitate all three main openings for sexual penetration (mouth, vagina, anus).

What one buys here is the partial object (erogenous zone) alone, deprived of the embarrassing additional burden of the entire person.’

This may well serve as a useful coda for considering the works of Martin Stöbich, an Austrian photographer who appropriates stills from online pornographic videos and superimposes snippets of text onto them. Assembled into a newspaperbound publication is WO NEHMEN WIR NUR JEDEN TAG AUFS NEUE DIESE ZUVERSICHT HER? (its alternative title is Wherefrom do we get this confidence everyday anew?). They are ‘recycled photographs on recycled paper’ according to the author’s website. In reality, Stöbich has created a body of work that offers a refreshingly subversive take on the cultural modifications of sex and violates the conventions of the medium.

In pornography there exists an obligation to see everything.

→ rola #1 © Martin Stöbich ↗ rola #4 © Martin Stöbich

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Unrestrained and unapologetic, every photograph re-presented within its pages is nothing short of explicit. In true pornographic fashion, flesh is laid bare, all orifices are on display. The only manipulation that has occurred is the conversion of the image into monochrome format.

All is stark and unabashed. No lyricism is bestowed upon the source material the way Thomas Ruff does in his series Nudes, for example. Ruff enlarges, alters and blurs his images to create pixelated renditions of the female form that are both lavish and detached in equal measure. By comparison the photographs Stöbich draws upon are abject, degrading and oppressively unsubtle. Although at the limit of the permissible, as composites they are somehow justified by their psychological context, which is achieved by the way Stöbich tempers his approach with clever pictorial wit.

This is of course because the images do only half the job. As part of his modus operandi, Stöbich pastes words over them, slick, brightly coloured extracts of text – aphorisms, questions, catchphrases – all set in a minimal typeface. They are frenzied bursts of words, sometimes in English, sometimes in German, that when

encoded, and contextualised through Stöbich's scripto-vision invite you to contemplate the potential double- entendre of everyday idioms. Words leap off the page and require the viewer to look around and through the lettering.

Meaning is born out of this unique synthesis of text and image, which demonstrates that an image not only expresses something but also causes something else – an ‘other’ image – to occur.

In one work, a woman’s face is covered in semen: ‘IT AIN’T OVER TILL IT’S OVER’ is superimposed to destabilise us, at least momentarily. The viewer’s curiosity is piqued; we are drawn in, confounded, not so much by a visual spectacle that is bedazzling to behold, far from it, but by the sense that what we are looking at is somehow, conceptually, emerging from the fractures between the public and private, the unseen and the unseeable.

Coming over a woman’s face is a ubiquitous trope in pornographic films, deployed to signal that a specific scene has ended, but research shows that an increasing number of young men believe this is the way sex is supposed to end.

Pornography, it seems, is not just reflect-

ing but constructing the way we behave in the real world. The image therefore functions simultaneously as an image of online pornography and a commentary on the nature and effects of online pornography itself. That is typical of the divided position taken up by many postmodern artworks – attempting to represent something that happens while at the same critiquing the process of that action. It also serves as a vivid reminder of just how visual pornography really is. In pornography there exists an obligation to see everything.

Elsewhere, DO YOU FEEL BETTER WHEN I TELL YOU IN MY IMAGINATION IT’S YOUR HANDS THAT TOUCH ME? pictures a woman perched on a sideboard mid-way though pleasuring herself, her head riding back, her eyes forced shut, toes curling. In one sense, this picture might bring to mind the idea that masturbation is a surrogate experience for sex; in another sense it might suggest pornography’s special capacity to have us believe that masturbation is sex.

Again, the work panders to the male, fantasy-fuelled appetite through Stöbich’s typical mix of irony with anxiety and his play with apprehension.

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martin stöbich

An image not only expresses something but also causes something else – an ‘other’ image – to occur.

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This direct mode of address is the linchpin of Stöbich’s works. In AND WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU COMING FROM? The YOU implicates us as the guilty party, those who partake in the horrible leering. His works are informed by a calculated measure to interpolate or beckon us as viewers, and in so doing insist on the kind of viewer they intend us to be. We are condemned as lustful, demeaning and irresponsible. We are instructed with certainty what our lives will look like, in a narrative and gathering of incidents that invites us to think reflexively about objectivity and gendered processes of identification.

Stöbich is an inspired mischief-maker, and his output can be taken seriously or not seriously at all. The words DON’T GET ME WRONG BUT I THINK WE SHOULD NOT SEE EACH OTHER AGAIN juxtaposed against an image of a couple copulating furiously is at once laugh-out-loud funny and psychologically chilling. But that’s Stöbich for you.

The scathing I KNOW THAT YOU KNOW THAT I KNOW THAT YOU KNOW is another example. His work thrives on polarities, confronting and challenging a deceptively simple but

inventive aesthetic – in its consistent application of reanimation and repetition – with a dry humour and knowing naiveté to create one big responsive gesture.

Using the slightest of means, Stöbich has captured, even exaggerated, the farce and hopelessness of lust in an age of instant gratification and short attention spans.

He deploys an economy of image and text to articulate and undermine the power-based relations established in such media. His work appears to inhabit an awkward ground in which the forces of cultivated taste and modern social dysfunction are absurd antitheses and coincidences with which we must live – as though awaiting a command for battle in a stand off between high and low culture, audience and scrutiny of judgement.

Dispassionately, and free from any moralizing or earnest impulse, Stöbich simply grasps in these pictures the contradictions inherent in the consumption of pornographic imagery; it is his ironic mode of viewing the complexities of contemporary culture.

diacy and excess: ‘How are we to cope with this brave new world which undermines the basic premises of our intimate life? The ultimate solution would be, of course, to push a vibrator into the Stamina Training Unit, turn them both on and leave all the fun to this ideal couple, with us, the two real human partners, sitting at a nearby table, drinking tea and calmly enjoying the fact that, without great effort, we have fulfilled our duty to enjoy.’ •

In the words of Slavoj Žižek, referring to the vulgarity of commodities that aim to service corporeal desire with such imme-

All images © Martin Stöbich Martin Stöbich (b. 1976, Linz) lives and works in Vienna. His list of clients includes McDonald’s, T-Mobile, Puma and the magazines Monocle, L´Officiel and Neon. The winner of numerous commercial awards, Stöbich is the author of self-published books printed in limited editions that encapsulate photographs gathered throughout his frequent journeys around Europe. His latest publication, Wo nehman wir nur jeden Tag aufs Neue diese Zuversicht her?, follows a more conceptual approach, overlaying text on pornographic images lifted from the Internet.

Tim Clark (b. 1981, UK) is the editor-in-chief and director of the contemporary photography online magazine 1000 Words Photography.

His texts have appeared in The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The British Journal of Photography, Next Level, Hotshoe, Foto8 and in several exhibition catalogues. He regularly co-organizes workshops with high profile photo­graphers such as Antoine d’Agata, Anders Petersen, Erik Kessels, Roger Ballen, Boris Mikhailov and Jeffrey Silverthorne in various cities around the world. Clark has previously held positions at galleries in both the public and private sector, including the Michael Hoppen Gallery, London. In 2011 he joined the Academy of Nominators for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

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Maxime Ballesteros Arrhythmia

Maxime Ballesteros

portfolio text

A Look

by Sean O’Toole Six year ago, Maxime Ballesteros, a young Frenchman who grew up in Lyon and studied art in Saint Etienne, packed up his things and headed north to Berlin. In a short space of time he has established himself as a capable editorial photographer increasingly known for his artfully styled portraits and candid statements on being young and in search of pleasure. When not producing his purposefully off-key fashion and social portraiture, he devotes himself to making jaunty documentary photographs that describe a man-made world peopled by men and women devoted to fleeting pleasures – kissing, gambling, smoking, posing for a camera.

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Presence is a synonym for existence, and existence is the fact or condition of being alive.

Despite the diverse tangents and styles contained in his growing body of work, Ballesteros is insistent that one word summarises it all. ‘For me it’s all documentary.’ Yes, even the editorial work. As with Wolfgang Tillmans and Corinne Day, whose early 1990s recessionary style Ballesteros’ work shares some obvious affinities with, magazines are important outlets for his photography. Esquire, i-D, Monopol, Purple Magazine, Tank and Vice have all showcased his work. I ask Ballesteros how making work for print magazines, that evergreen format, has helped him define his photographic vision.

‘It’s the other way around,’ he replies.

‘My work and photographic vision has helped me doing editorials. They have more visibility than my personal work, although they are secondary.’Ballesteros is not being brattish when he says this.

Remember, he is a Frenchman living in Berlin responding to an interview in English. Maybe, he offers, ‘secondary’ isn’t the right word. Probably. Safer to venture that his emergent practice mixes personal reportage with stuff other people want him to do. For his part, Ballesteros is not too fussed about distinguishing ‘this’ from ‘that’, or policing what is ‘theirs’ from ‘mine’. ‘As long as the photos make sense together, I don’t draw any border between them,’ he says. His laissezfaire style is getting him noticed.

In 2010, Tycoon Books, a Tokyo-based independent publisher established a year earlier by Taro Serikawa and Yosuke Watanabe, produced a limited edition monograph compiling his work. Titled A Step Back, it showcased his diverse approach to subject matter and transnational eye. The book dutifully includes some of his fashion portraiture, which rehearse the perviness of Ellen von Unwerth and Terry Richardson, the ask­ance gaze of Los Angelinos Jeff Burton and Larry Sultan, and the hard flash of outré master Guy Bourdin, while somehow achieving something authentic. A look.

The book also included a documentary study of a motorcycle parked alongside a Saint Etienne pavement. In and of itself, it is an unremarkable photo. A sunbleached blue protective cover obscures the motorcycle. There is little to look at.

And yet the photograph is somehow important. Possibly it is because it anticipates a later photograph, a more recent and expansive outdoor scene showing a covered over Corvette seen in the Californian beach community of Morro Bay.

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These two photos introduce a recurring idea in Ballesteros’s work, one that is pertinent to how he describes the human form. This portfolio includes two photographs, both shot in a bedroom in Berlin, both describing slender female models obscured by black stockings.

This sort of thing happens a lot in his photography. Subjects hide, are obscured: behind leather, denim, rubber, silk, even the tattooists ink. There is, it would seem, a will in his photography to describe things that we cannot fully know and see.

↖ Tracy and fur on the shelf © Maxime Ballesteros ↗ Mob, Saint-Etienne © Maxime Ballesteros

I want to show a world that everybody knows, albeit from a slightly different angle, by framing only a selected part of it.

‘I don’t really work with concepts,’ insists Ballesteros. ‘I don’t want to show things that nobody knows, I want to show a world that everybody knows, albeit from a slightly different angle, by framing only a selected part of it. I live with my camera and collect images every day.’ His harvest so far has yielded photographs describing late-night debauchery and a silly-sexiness that anticipates sex. Of course, it has retrieved other things too: dogs with glassy eyes, trees that look like they have been gift-wrapped for who knows what, frail shelters that will never be homes, a man weightlifting. ‘Anything,’ as Ballesteros neatly puts it. His approach elevates equivalence, not difference.

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‘I do shoot a lot indoors, and at night,’ he says, confirming rather than answering a question. As for the why, he thinks it’s because there are ‘a lot of things’ that attract him to working indoors after dark. He doesn’t list these things; after all, his photography offers an adequate statement. If I had to conjecture, these things might include the ‘sad beauty’ of ‘hired flesh,’ to loosely quote Charles Baudelaire. Or the pleasure that derives from being right up against the surface of bodies in motion, bodies at play.

Ballesteros says he doesn’t use a powerful flash. This is a fact, but it also operates as an alibi. ‘I like to be close to things,’ he states. Being up close he is present, and presence is what his photography tries to record. Presence is a synonym for existence, and existence is the fact or condition of being alive. Out of this tangle of propositions emerges the singular idea that drives Ballesteros.

‘My work talks a lot about death,’ he says. ‘Not in a dark or direct way.’ Only rarely does Ballesteros figure the way mankind ravages the planet and its animal inhabitants. His notion of documentary doesn’t extend to that. He prefers rather to use the camera to ask questions

maxime ballesteros

‘I don’t want to speak specifically about cars, or about sexiness, or about fashion,’ says Ballesteros, who regards his subjects, whether animate or not, as all operating on the same level. They are simply phenomena from the here and now. ‘I simply want to collect selected parts and pieces of the world to put them together again.

And go looking for more. My work is very much about the present.’ This statement makes him uncomfortable. Maybe, he says, it sounds ‘very obvious’. Perhaps it is, but sometimes the very obvious needs to be remarked upon. Take that motorcycle in Saint Etienne: he photographed it during the day. Although not averse to working in daylight – he has photographed earthmoving equipment on a sunny beach in Nice, a spotted Dalmatian

in a suburb of Mexico City, a graffitied billboard declaring lovelessness in the California desert, all using available light – Ballesteros is however most fluent working indoors, at night.

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about what it means to be alive. ‘That’s something that is always at the back of my mind; how one lives before one dies.’

So how do fashionable young Berliners and their co-relations in California live before crashing headfirst into the ground like Superman in that one photograph?

Badly. Excessively. Irresponsibly. Drunk and on their arses. Sometimes flat on their backs, gleefully alive not dead. It is one of the pleasures of youth to endure this devastation, to come through the slaughter of those endless nights, scarred but fundamentally intact.

Shortly before interviewing Ballesteros, I read a New York Times profile of Hedi Slimane, the creative director of Yves Saint Laurent. Slimane, whose talents extend to making icy black-and-white portraits that possess the aluminium elegance of David Bowie, circa Thin White Duke, has caused a stir by casting ‘unwholesome rock stars like Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson to represent what was once the most revered fashion house in Paris, synonymous with Catherine Deneuve and Betty Catroux’. Degrada­ tion, it seems, it back in vogue. But is it helpful to saddle Ballesteros with the label grunge just because haute couture is expediently recycling recession as style?

Let me rephrase this question slightly. Is it at all important when looking at Ballesteros’ photos that one recognises shades of those earlier masters of lust who not coincidentally also happened to make

photographs when economics was less than rosy? I batted this convoluted proposition to the photographer. He knocked back an uncomplicated response.

‘I don’t really associate myself with or take as reference any photographer. To be honest I don’t buy or read magazines or photo books, nor follow contemporary photography. So I always feel a bit stupid when it comes to references. I finished art school in 2007, and back then, when I was studying, I spent some time in the library looking at photo books. But it was not a big school, and we didn’t have many books.’

What it lacked in scale it certainly made up for in concentration and focus.

Ballesteros looked at books by Klein, Bourdin, Kertesz, Bresson, Arbus, Newton, D’Agata, Goldin and Tillmans.

Other names followed: Alec Soth, Olaf Martens, Andrew Phelps, Boris Mikhailov, William Eggleston and Jurgen Teller. ‘As different as their work can be, I find them all very interesting.

I feel like I can understand what they are talking about in their photographs or series.’ Understanding photography is a perplexing business. Partly it is because it requires coming to terms with what a photograph is, and also what it cannot be. Given the abundant theme that his photography is being asked to address in this issue, I end our exchange with another rambling thought pretending to

be a question. Can lust or desire be photographed? The history and ongoing success of the porn industry might suggest yes. But in a way, photography also denies lust, or is a surrogate for lust.

Photography is not lust.

Ballesteros is happy to dive headfirst into the philosophical debate. ‘As true or honest as you want to be, photography – like film – is still a re-creation. So in that sense, yes, you can maybe photograph – or film – lust.’ The montage of photographs here is an expression of his belief. They are evidence of his gut reaction to a request from this magazine to select photographs from his archive that somehow speak to the theme.

‘But,’ interjects Ballesteros, ‘I’m not sure I’m answering your question. I usually take photos of little things, of details, of combination of things, but always in a simple, direct and, I hope, clear way. In this sense, none of the images individually would be a photograph of lust, but the associations created by all of them together could give you an idea, or take you by the hand on the path to it.’

•

All images © Maxime Ballesteros Maxime Ballesteros (b. 1984, Lyon) graduated with a DNSEP (MFA of art) from École supérieure d’art et design de Saint-Étienne, France, in 2007. He has since been based in Berlin where he has extensively documented the city’s youth and night scene. His raw imagery fueled with a sexual charge has brought him clients such as 032c, Artforum, Dazed Digital, Esquire, Flaunt, Harper’s Bazaar Art Arabia, i-D, Interview Germany, Monocle, Monopol, Purple Magazine. Moreover, his work as been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain and Russia.

Sean O’Toole (b. 1968, Pretoria, South Africa) is a Cape Town-based journalist and writer. He is co-editor of Cityscapes, a journal for urban enquiry, and writes a bi-monthly column for frieze magazine.

He wrote a weekly photo column for the South African Sunday Times for six years, until 2010, and has written critical essays on David Goldblatt, Guy Tillim, Jo Ractliffe, Mikhael Subotzky and Pieter Hugo, amongst others.

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Larry Clark Jonathan Velasquez

Larry Clark

portfolio text

(untitled) 165

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↖ Jonathan Velasquez, 2004 © Larry Clark, courtesy Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London ↗ Jonathan Velasquez, Venice Beach, 2006 © Larry Clark, courtesy Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London

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larry clark

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All images © Larry Clark, courtesy Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London Larry Clark (b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma) is an American artist.

While a teenager Clark developed his photography skills working as an assistant to his mother, a door-to-door baby photographer.

He later spent two years at a commercial photography school.

Larry Clark achieved both fame and notoriety with the publication of his first book Tulsa in 1971. Shot sporadically between 1963 and 1971, the book graphically documented the hard drug underworld of Tulsa. Although drug use, sex and violence are the main themes, the images are often beautifully composed and his subjects are sympathetically presented. Tulsa, often compared to Robert Frank’s book, The Americans, demonstrated a new style of photography that was subjective, alienated and completely detached from any social agenda. Clark raised the ante for engaged photography; his work offered a lived experience rather than a merely observed one.His subsequent photographic work explored themes of emerging masculinity by focusing on teenage boys that Clark felt were both “sexualized and demonized.” In his collages and videos of the late 1980s and early 1990s, he broadened this investigation into revealing the ways that mass media alternately creates, rejects, and eroticizes young people. Stills from his video pieces were shown in his first and second solo exhibitions at the Luhring Augustine gallery in New York in 1990 and 1992. In 1995, Clark released his first feature film, Kids, which premiered at that year’s Sundance Film Festival and was hailed as “an instant classic” and “a wake-up call.” Kids was followed by the films Another Day in Paradise (1998), Bully (2001), Teenage Caveman (2001), Ken Park (2003), WASSUP ROCKERS (2005), and the autobiographical installation and publication punk Picasso (2003). Marfa Girl (2012) is the most recent film written and directed by Clark. The film was released independently on his website (www.larryclark.com) and won the Marcus Aurelius Award for Best Film at the 2012 Rome Film Festival. Clark has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Photographers’ Fellowship in 1973 and the Creative Arts Public Service Photographers’ Grant in 1980.

He continues to exhibit his artwork worldwide and his work is included in the collections of numerous important museum and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Frankfurt Museum für Moderne Kunst, Germany. A retrospective of Clark's work, Kiss the past hello, was held at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in the fall of 2010. A big portion of his work has been exhibited at C /O Berlin in 2012. He lives and works in New York.

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Antoine d’Agata Anticorps

Antoine d'Agata

portfolio text

Propaganda by deed

by Bernard Marcadé Antoine d’Agata’s world is a world of flow, of images, materials, sensations and emotions… Every image that Antoine d’Agata makes is a way of stopping, of breaking a continuum of sensations, in an endless flow of life, emotions, gestures, situations… Every image is sealed by this paradox: it is at once a fixed object and a taking, a tapping… Antoine d’Agata’s images are precipitates, in the chemical sense.

His photographs are concretions of lived events, sequences of life. D’Agata conjures up his images like leftovers, vestiges of actions or situations that cannot be represented themselves. The only points of reference are a few surviving images.1

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Antoine d’Agata’s photographs are not representations, but are literally torn-off pieces. Every image is a pulling out more than a construction or a composition (d’Agata doesn’t compose an image, he tears it out from the reality of his own life). At the core of these images the artist calls ‘night’ is the flesh. These images are scraps of flesh. Flesh that is loved, manipulated, assaulted and drugged. Flesh

↖ Phnom Penh, 2009 © Antoine D'Agata / Magnum Photos → Tokyo, 2008 © Antoine D'Agata / Magnum Photos

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The process set up by Antoine d’Agata relies on a random spot which makes the photographic narrative possible. Only the imaginary reveals the real impossibility. In effect, telling a story is more important to him than an image. The process demands a sacrifice, an ultimate act, the meaning of which is only revealed when it becomes a story one can tell, through the artistic gesture, an narrative of flow and perpetual destinies, of immoderateness, of random excesses, of individual realities, of exploration of the basic drives of nature and humanity, of the permanent tension between the irreconcilable forces of rationality and instinct.

crossed by time and the accidents of circumstance. In the bowels of the city’s underbelly, entwined bodies convulse, losing themselves in a chaos of drugs and sex. The artist’s insane undertaking of the last twenty years is supposed to end up with the elimination of the distance between him and his models. The desire to fill an absolute distance, the penis held out in the emptiness, the camera records the same worn chronology, clumsiness yields to compulsion; this is his technique of the collapse. For that matter, are they ‘models’? All the women in the photographs are more like accomplices, partners in this unprecedented enterprise. The vast majority of them are prostitutes. For all that, we are not in the aesthetic of the ‘women of the bordello’ here. These women are not aesthetic alibis, but beings with whom d’Agata maintains an intense and violent relationship, mixing sexual and drug experiences in an extreme way. The women he has met and photographed all participate in a shared world beyond their respective countries, the realm of the margins of the ‘civilised’ world, ruled by a paradoxically preserved form of humanity. The lawless areas are the territories of all the discrepancies, refuges for wounded specimens of humanity, a closed and privileged space where bestiality undermines decorum and society’s laws. There is no indulgence here, no idealising, but the recognition of crude, in-your-face acts.

At no time does Antoine d’Agata take the position of a voyeur, and the women he photographs never stray into exhibitionism themselves. The complicity of the artist with these women is of a different nature; it challenges culturally imposed pictures of eroticism and pornography. It is a cruel dead-end quest, to embrace the violence of the streets, to live the experience in your flesh: learn the deadly language that passes goes beyond all poetry, track down the irruption of life, dirty and brutal, into the order of our proprieties, look for the fragile truth of gestures, recognise solidarity where others see an irremediable nothingness, let oneself drown in the girls’ unbearable beauty, shut oneself up in the certitude of a radical solitude, strip naked, astonished at the physical world which slides away, and pay the price to the point of sacrifice.

Only the imaginary reveals the real impossibility.

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Antoine d’Agata is not interested in form. The only valid form in his eyes is the one that arrives, that takes shape, not through his camera, but in the most intimate life, that which becomes apparent and suddenly appears from the heart of the event while living life. Photography, until now dedicated to exploring the dimensions of the past and of the imagination, can only be a matter of gestures, an art of being present and of the moment, subversive, asocial, erotic, amoral.

Antoine d’Agata is a reluctant photog­ rapher. Because he physically shows its vacuity, but is aware that he himself is involved in this process, and thus that he does not emerge unscathed from the images he produces. It’s an illusion that you can possess the desired world through an image, without demanding destructive labour of your body. Following the example of Pierre Guyotat, who described his writing as ‘prostitution­nelle’, we can speak of Antoine d’Agata’s ‘prostitutional photography’. The only valid art is one that is harmful, subversive, asocial, atheist, erotic

Sexuality is the cardinal place where the contradictions of our world become much sharper.

Photography as martial art: the formula is daring, but it underlines well the proportion of ritual commanding the development of these images. A ritual, that is, here a requirement. For d’Agata, it’s not a matter of subscribing to any and all spectacles. Every image carries the story of a risk. The rituals of d’Agata have an almost bullfight-like precision, even a desire to ‘take the bull by the horns’, to lose oneself in an exchange with no other horizon than the presence of a danger that at any moment could prove to be fatal, a similar relationship that mixes the trivial and the sublime. Defeat, loss, immoderate waste, until in the infinite contraction of time, through a kind of desperate stoicism, expectation and accomplishment, instant and duration, coincide in a single glorious, nihilistic, vain, anonymous, maladroit, repeated gesture…

Antoine d’Agata deliberately takes ‘the side of evil’ (Guy Debord), which allows him to relate to the real. It is from this suffering, both social and sexual, that he draws his energy. Suffering engenders dignity, respect, solidarity, tenderness, class

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and immoral, antidote to the spectacular infection that neutralises minds and distils death. Thus photography is not this angelic, protective art that shelters us from the noise and frenzy of the world, but instead an experience that thrusts us into, and compromises us in, the hiatuses of our reality.

For d’Agata, there is a form of transubstantiation between the photographed gestures and the photographic gesture itself (his images, like those of Pasolini or Caravaggio, exude a certain Catholicism).

The compulsive capturing and reproducing of these derisory and elusive realities are built on the same principles: congestion, collisions, cul-de-sac, recurrences, visual and emotional short-cuts where the feeling goes beyond the non-event. D’Agata’s photography relates to abduction; it is still marked by the chaotic violence of the gestures made. Photography is not a means of control, but only here to record the intensities. A blank slate, it is this thin and derisory object that allows gestures to be transcribed with the smallest possible gap. The camera isderisory, rude, fragmentary, but the only art that directly connects experience to consciousness, and updates these tensions because it is not constrained by the test of conscious development. The camera carries the seeds of action in itself, the gesture equivalent to the act of perception itself: photography as a martial art whose unique principle would be the desire for the world.

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consciousness, generosity that fit in with the sickening mechanisms of misery. Antoine d’Agata’s photography is a political work, if we take the term in a non-restrictive way. In this sense, one cannot object to his using, for the sake of convenience, ‘images of day’, connected to historical and wartime contexts (such as Libya, Auschwitz and Cambodia) and ‘images of night’, connected to his sexual and drug-related roamings. Despite their formal differences, his images come from the same world, that of contemporary alienation. But perhaps, the ‘images of night’ are more striking by virtue of their deterritorialised nature, and really point out the servitude of our age in a radical way, because they are less literal. The hybrid community of those who have nothing escapes despite itself from the dream of merchandise, from the imperatives of consumerism and the breaking down of reality; it is rediscovering its dissatisfaction, forging a destiny of its own in order to find a place in history, to live in infamy, to break with the slavery of gratification, to refuse in fact to consent to being exploited in order to melt in a dance of sex and death.

Antoine d’Agata is linked to the population of the planet’s deprived zones where prostitutes, pimps, dealers, delinquents and the degraded of all kinds mingle with each other. His gaze is neither condescending nor at all compassionate.

D’Agata feels he belongs to the same ‘dirty species’ (to take Michel Foucault’s formulation) as his photographed partners. The so-called dangerous classes, collateral damage of today’s spectacular and globalised capitalism, carry the seeds of revolt against all the established orders (economic, racial and sexual).

Global capitalism has neither an end nor a boundary to restrain it, and its deterioration, the product of the unassimilated corruption of an organic manner of standards of return, is provoking the emergence of black holes and deviant attitudes that undermine its moral postulates.

Sexuality is the cardinal place where the contradictions of our world become much sharper. The obscenity of the bodies Antoine d’Agata photographs can be understood as the radical backfiring of the – far more pregnant and dangerous – obscenity in society and the media. Obscenity is in the hypocrisy of legislation, the psychological stupefaction of the subjugated masses, the limiting of movements by the flesh in the social domain, the culture of fear and insecurity, the controlled suffocation of experience, the infinity of technologies that perpetuate self-regulation and the discipline of crowds fascinated by the spectacle of their slavery, and the promise of new happiness.

In this sense, Antoine d’Agata’s photographs are far from the world of pornography. Their crudeness and violence even turn them into an explicit criticism of it. Faced with the oppression that generates the abundance of stereotyped images, and their reduction by cultural industries, faced with this generalised pornography, to live becomes the only thing at stake; and the only possible work of which there can be any question is to commit insane acts. Faced with the economic, social and mediagenic pornography in the world today, only the ‘propaganda by deed’ of insane acts is likely to foment new turmoil, that is, to create new situations.

1. All quotations by Antoine d’Agata are from his book Anticorps published (in French) by Éditions Xavier Barral.

All images © Antoine d'Agata / Magnum Photos, courtesy Kahmann Gallery, Amsterdam and Éditions Xavier Barral Antoine d’Agata (b. 1961, Marseille) studied at the International Center of Photography of New York under the guidance of Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. Opting for a nomadic trajectory, d’Agata immerses himself in the marginalised situations he photographs, producing an intimate body of work oriented towards the obsessive and murky sides of reality. A member of Magnum Photos, his work has been published in several books and presented in exhibition spaces and festivals worldwide. His latest solo exhibition, Anticorps, accompanied by the publication of a new monograph, was held earlier this year at Le Bal, in Paris.

Bernard Marcadé (b. 1948, Talence) is an art critic, an independent curator and a teacher of aesthetic and art history at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts of Paris-Cergy. The author of several publications on art theory, he has notably written about Pierre et Gilles, Isidore Ducasse and Marcel Duchamp. He is actually preparing a biography on Francis Picabia. Among others, he has curated the following exhibitions: Féminin-Masculin, Le sexe de l’art, Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 1995), Je ne crois pas aux fantômes, mais j’en ai peur, « La Force de l’art », Grand Palais (Paris, 2006), Aftermoon/Bertrand Lavier, Tsum Foundation (Moscow, 2010), Courant d’art au rayon de la quincaillerie paresseuse, L’observatoire du BHV (Paris, 2010).

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Photobooks

foam magazine # 35 lust

by Sebastian Hau

Vera Brandner Picturing Others Fotohof, an Austrian centre for photo­ graphy based in Salzburg, has produced remarkable shows and books for over thirty years. Among its recent publica­ tions, Picturing Others is particularly interesting as a photobook – the way in which form and content have been de­ signed to work together presents a few surprises. Vera Brandner works with community-based photo projects, visi­ ting countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and by passing on cameras to workshop participants she aims to enable intercultural exchange and ap­ preciation.The main section of the book is made up of a collection of portraits in black-and-white, often of young wo­ men, in rural settings and with villages as a backdrop. They feel natural – it’s as if the dialogue that preceded the moment of the photograph or indeed the photographer’s interest in dialogue with her subjects injects life into the images, which makes them more inte­ resting than the standard reportage photography from the poorer countries on this planet.

The Swiss binding permits a better viewing of the double pages, and a se­ cond booklet with an index, text and a second choice of accompanying photo­ graphs is hidden in the back flap. The text gives insight into the workings of Ipsum, the agency with which Vera Brandner works, and the photographs in the booklet come from the partici­ pants in the workshops. Paper stock, printing and design are sober and ele­ gant; the book enables a joyful disco­ very of the work.

In a long-running project, initiated through contact with a family member in prison, American artist Alyse Emdur has contacted long-term prisoners to share with her their self-portraits.

These are mostly generic images, taken in recreation rooms and intended to be sent back to the prisoners’ families, charged with emotion and hope but often taken in the most casual or con­ ventional way. Although the book has a colourful cover, it resists showing us stereotypes or freaks. Its academic appearance asks the reader to read its text to gain greater access to a shut-off world. The book resists showing simple typologies; in that sense too it has a somewhat academic appearance, mi­ xing text and images, and it does not directly sell itself as an artist book.

But the experience of looking at these photographs of prisoners is at once satisfying and troubling. The quality of the editing and research becomes apparent with repeated viewing.

Australian artist Louis Porter has used his digital camera to document signs in the urban landscape that report strug­ gle, such as Nazi graffiti, emergency assembly points and ’crap paint jobs‘ – and after self-publishing parts of the work through fanzines he has now combined them into a surprising selfpublished book, designed by Pierre Hourquet of booksonline.fr. The photo­ graphs in each series are printed on colored paper stock, the discarded art on a shiny blue background, the paper airplanes on orange. This approach may not be to everyone’s taste, but it works fine for this reviewer. It enhances the offbeat humour of deadpan photo­ graphs and the subversiveness of the book has something in common with a company report of an ailing business.

Fotohof ISBN 9783902675576

Four Corners Books ISBN 9780956192868

Twenty Shelves Books ISBN 9780646588186

Alyse Embur Prison Landscapes

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Louis Porter Conflict Resolution

photobooks

Vicente Paredes Furtivos Lieko Shiga Rasen Kaigan

Published by Mexican RM and Spanish Fiesta, created by Ricardo Cases of Paloma al Aire-fame, this little book speaks of the newfound confidence and abilities of a circle of Spanish photo­graphers loosely linked to Julian Baron of the Escuela de Blank Paper, an independent photo school in Madrid.

The work Furtivos involves portraits and scenes taken in small gardens outside Bilbao, where the laid-off have created patches of self-reliance at a time of countrywide crisis. The colourful photo­ graphs, taken with a strong flash that picks out unpleasant and funny details, often estrange the portrayed from the natural setting of the garden work, clearly poking fun at our love and ad­ miration for apartiemento-like stories of healthy living and back-to-nature schemes. But, as in Ricardo Cases’ work, the photographer never distances him­ self too much from the people he works with – reminding us of Martin Parr’s early work, where irony and sardonic detail are set in a comprehensive world view that ultimately loves its inhabitants.

Berlin-based publisher Roland Angst has undertaken a great and laudable effort to make known beyond France the work of one of its more interesting photographers, Stéphane Duroy. Famil­ iar to to a small international circle of fans for his poetical and significant books (mostly published by Filigranes in Paris) about immigration and European history since the Second World War, Duroy has accumulated an astonishing archive over thirty years.

The new book by Only Photography sorts the images into Streets, Children and Travel. The choice of images is impeccable. Some of his colour images from the lives of the working class in the UK in the 1980s are as powerful as the best of Chris Killip or Graham Smith.

The de luxe edition and production will do much to introduce Duroy’s rich work to a larger audience.

Shiga’s work has already been described in Japanese blogs as the most relevant and beautiful work in Japan today. The publication by AKAAKA of this oversized book does justice to the quality of Lieko Shiga’s new work. Produced in a coastal village in northern Japan, before and after the tsunami two years ago, the troubling images are experiments with ceremonies and stories derived from the oral history of the villagers in heavily staged and reworked photographs of local residents. The images often trans­ mit a strong effect through multiple layers of creation (technical, narrative, constructed, chemical). The book achieves a strong emotional effect with its complex structure like TONK’s Great Unreal in which images recur in varying states of production. Rasen Kaigan is an important statement by a young artist. It is an artist book of consequence that provides an overwhelming experi­ ence for its readers.

Fiesta Ediciones/RM ISBN 9788461606832

Only Photography ISBN 9783981253764

AKAAKA Art Publishing ISBN 9784903545929

Stéphane Duroy Guardian of Time

191

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#34 Dummy Linda Beumer / Yuji Hamada / OliverHartung / Arthur Mole / Shinji Otani /Max Pinckers / Mahesh Shantaram / Mirte Slaats

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#27 Report Chris de Bode / Aernout Mik / Amirali Ghasemi / Taryn Simon / Rolls Tohoku / Doug Rickard / Mikhael Subotzky & Patrick Waterhouse / Michael Christopher Brown

#26 Happy Yeondoo Jung / Thomas Mailaender / Henze Boekhout / Olivia Bee / Ruth van Beek / Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky / Jaimie Warren / Inge Morath

#25 Traces Seba Kurtis / Willem Popelier / Ishiuchi Miyako / Robert Frank / James D. Griffioen / Gert Jan Kocken / Anni Leppälä / The La Brea Matrix

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Foam enables people all over the world to experience and ­enjoy photography, whether it’s at our museum in Amsterdam, on the ­website, via our internationally ­distributed magazine or in our E ­ ditions department.

The heart of Foam is located in the centre of Amsterdam, in the museum on the K ­ eizersgracht. Here we schedule a varied programme of exhibitions including world-famous photographers as well as young or undiscovered talent.

Large-scale exhibitions alternate with small, quickly changing shows. We also organise a dynamic programme of lectures, discussions, guided tours, workshops and special events.

Open daily 10:00 – 18:00, Thu⁄Fri 10:00 – 21:00

foam magazine # 35 lust Gloria Swanson, 1924 © Edward Steichen / Courtesy Condé Nast Publications

196

Edward Steichen In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years, 1923–1937

28 June 2013 – 6 September 2013

The exhibition Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years, 1923 – 1937, with more than 200 unique vintage photos, represents a high point in Steichen’s long photographic career. The works that he made throughout this period for the influential Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines are some of the most impressive creations of the twentieth century. They have been brought together especially for this exhibition and are being shown for the first time in the Netherlands.

Far more than his predecessors, Steichen propelled fashion photography to new heights, analogous in significance to the transition in films from silent to sound. He abandoned artistic efforts in the movements of photographic Impressionism, Art Nouveau and Symbolism and developed into the foremost Art Deco photographer and founder of modern glamour photography.

In addition to extraordinary photos for fashion houses such as Worth and Poiret, as well as for more well-known houses such as Chanel and Schiaparelli, the Steichen archive of Condé Nast, New York, contains impressive portraits including Greta Garbo, Cecil B. DeMille, Winston Churchill, Marlene Dietrich, George Gershwin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Amelia Earhart, Walt Disney and hundreds of other celebrities.

Steichen’s genius, however, was not limited to 1930s fashion and glamour photo­graphy.

Steichen was a major pioneer in the medium of photography from the late nineteenth century until far into the twentieth. He was a photographer (first and foremost an independent art photographer, but he also worked as a journalistic and military photographer during WWI and WWII). He was a founding partner of the trail-blazing magazine Camera Work (1903-1917), together with Alfred Stieglitz, with whom he also introduced artists like Rodin, Matisse and Brancusi for the first time in the US. He was also curator of the famous international travelling exhibition The Family of Man, started in 1955, and became director of the photography department at MOMA. Edward Steichen: In High Fashion has been produced by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis in collaboration with Foam. William A. Ewing, Todd Brandow and Nathalie Herschdorfer are the curators for this exhibition.

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197

foam amsterdam

Edward Steichen (1879-1973) was already a celebrated painter and photographer on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean when in early 1923 he was offered one of the most prestigious and surely one of the most lucrative positions in commercial photography – chief photographer at Condé Nast (publisher of influential and renowned magazines). Throughout those fifteen years Steichen made the most of his exceptional talent, portraying the culture of the era and the most prominent representatives of literature, journalism, dance, sports, politics, theatre and film. His greatest fame, however, came from his haute couture photos.

Marnix Goossens Yonder

foam magazine # 35 lust

19 July – 6 October 2013

Remedy, from the series Yonder, 2011 © Marnix Goossens

198

foam amsterdam

Schack, from the series Yonder, 2012 Š Marnix Goossens

This summer Foam is presenting a series of new work by Marnix Goossens (born Leeuwarden, 1967) in the exhibition Yonder. The exhibition runs from 19 July to 6 October 2013 and features a combination of Goossens' photographs combined for the first time with a short video. In Yonder he concentrates on surrogate nature in slightly run-down interiors, showing man's secret yearnings for exotic destinations and snowcovered mountains in the form of palm-print wallpaper and decorative posters.

Nature forms a constant source of inspiration for Goossens, yet he makes no use of spectacular panoramic views or untouched wildernesses. Instead he uses tiles with plant motifs, wood grain plastic self-adhesive film and flowery wallpaper as a means of escaping the claustrophobic interior of the house. Photographs showing strange corners and reproductions are interspersed with photographs of windows through which light comes streaming in, also bringing a suggestion of the lightness of our being.

Goossens always manages to find the beauty in the smallest details of the everyday world around us. He registers commonplace, almost boring objects, but with the aid of his technical camera he turns them into something special, recording details almost too small to see with the naked eye. The perfect composition, profusion of details, nuances in colour, fitting frame, appropriate lighting and the supreme moment for each shot are chosen with care, enabling him to give his own unique view of the unexpected side of otherwise ordinary places. •

199

OttoKaan Works

foam magazine # 35 lust

19 July – 11 September 2013

Reflector, 2012 © OttoKaan

What to do if you have just graduated from the art academy and you want to furnish your studio but do not have enough money to buy new things? If you have always collaborated, shared, but without a system? The photographers duo OttoKaan is composed by Berend Otto (1985) and Guus Kaandorp (1985). They both attended the Royal Academy in The Hague and noticed that the research for their projects went much smoother when they joined forces and worked together. They present a new series titled Photographic Furniture and related works as part of the 3h program in Foam.

With a playful approach their latest project researches the environment of their studio and the world of photographic tools within, creating sculptures and installations that are alienating and a true challenge for the eye.

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200

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2013

SAVE THE DATE 14.17 NOV 2013 GRAND PALAIS

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A MAGAZINE OF PHOTOGRAPHY & WRITING ISSUE No. 14 PHILIP GEFTER MALCOLM LIGHTNER PADGETT POWELL NAMSA LEUBA LISA IMMORDINO VREELAND BOBBY DOHERTY MARTIN DENKER BILLY MONK MARK ALICE DURANT DEARDAVEMAGAZINE.COM Bobby Doherty, Dave, 2012

Maarten van Schaik Car Nude XI, 2012, Piezo print on fine art paper, 35 x 52,5 cm, Edition of 10 + 2 AP, € 640,-

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D R A N W E A E S Y N U MM U D 13 0 2 Send us your unpublished photobook and you may win a complete book production.

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David Bowie, Aladdin Sane, 1973 by Brian Duffy © Duffy Archive/Gallery Vassie

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Athi-Patra Ruga, The Future Women of Azania, 2012, performance in Johannesburg.

Out Now: Elephant #14 Elephant travels to Cape Town in the company of photographer Pieter Hugo gathering an explosive mix of writing, music, design and art, not to mention some highly original socio-political ideas and rather 'interesting' anecdotes. Sue Hubbard looks at the career of South Africa's seminal artist William Kentridge, who is not the only seminal artist in this issue as we reassess the work (and colourful personality) of Maggi Hambling and visit the studio of France's most controversial artist, Adel Abdessemed. We then put on a diving bell to find out how Jason de Caires Taylor creates his astonishing underwater works before joining orbiting satellites to follow artists working with Google Earth. frameweb.com/elephant Download the Layar app and scan the page for a sneak peek inside Elephant magazine

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Francesca Woodman Autorretrato hablando con Vince / Self Portrait Talking to Vince, 1975-78/1999 Š Estate Francesca Woodman / SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Vienna

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You Are Cordially Invited

N° 1

Dress by Antoine Peters Photography by Petra Stavast and Sanne van den Elzen

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You Are Cordially Invited – Magazine The Art Fair issue

You Are Cordially Invited is a new magazine on contemporary art, manifested as a twodimensional exhibition space. It aims to explore the context and meaning of art and the environment in which it thrives. With a visual approach, which touches upon aesthetics already common in fashion, the magazine aims to reach a wider audience for contemporary art.

For the launch issue of You Are Cordially Invited Dutch a r t world den izens Alexander Mayhew (art critic and curator) and Jaring Dürst Britt (director Nieuwe Vide, Haarlem) have been invited to make a selection of artists and galleries within the framework and concept of the art fair.

This selection of galleries are repeatedly interrupted with a pre-enactment of it’s own opening. In the ‘Vernissage’ scenes, by art directors and fashion photographers severafrahm, people are watching the works and browsing through an exhibition. Visually presenting the more social context of an art fair by combining art with fashion.

Participants of de Appel Arts Centre’s newest programme, The Gallerist Programme, are working towards holding a booth at Liste 18 (the young Art fair in Basel, June 2013). In You Are Cordially Invited they reveal their presention of artists.

Alongside the exhibition section, one artist is given the opportunity to present their work and ref lect on archetypical elements of a ‘Solo Show’. In this first issue artist collective Suze May Sho outlines and redefines what a ‘Solo Show’ can entail with their presentation of project Probe, as a blue print for in the following issues.

OUT NOW! THE ART FAIR ISSUE

128 pages full colour, english, print run of 5000, size 23,5 × 30,0 cm CONTRIBUTIONS BY

de Appel Arts Centre, Bart de Baets, Cobbenhagen Hendriksen, Jaring Dürst Britt, Louise Kelpe, Alexander Mayhew, severafrahm, Suze May Sho, Antoine Peters + REPRESENTING INTERNATIONAL GALLERIES

Ambach & Rice (Los Angeles), Christian Andersen (Copenhagen), Arcade (London), Laura Bartlett (London), BolteLang (Zürich), Braverman (Tel Aviv), Lisa Cooley (New York), Frank Elbaz (Paris), Laurel Gitlen (New York), Jeanine Hofland (Amsterdam), Hopkinson Mossman (Auckland), Galerie Laboratorio (Prague), Emanuel Layr (Vienna), Tanya Leighton (Berlin), Wilfried Lentz (Rotterdam), Leto (Warsaw), Motive (Brussels), NoguerasBlanchard (Madrid), NON (Istanbul), Office Baroque (Antwerp), Micky Schubert (Berlin), Leo Xu Projects (Shanghai) and Zero (Milan) COVER PRICE

Europe € 15,00 – Rest of the world $ 19.80 Distributed worldwide by Export Press and Idea Books

You Are Cordially Invited – The Art Fair Issue www.youarecordiallyinvited.nl

Order your copy through the website www.youarecordiallyinvited.nl

Foam Magazine’s choice of paper The paper used in this magazine was supplied by paper merchant Igepa.

For more information please call +31 344 578 100 or email skirschner@igepa.nl

The cover is printed on Maxi Offset 250g/m², wood-free offset paper EU Flower awarded

The text pages are printed on Circle Offset 90g/m2, 100 % recycled paper FSC

Mao Ishikawa is printed on Profibulk 1.1, 100g/m2, wood-free white bulky design paper FSC

Paul Kooiker & Erik Kessels is printed on Circle Offset, 90g/m2, 100 % recycled paper FSC

Rico & Micheal is printed on Circle Gloss 130g/ m2, 100% recycled coated paper FSC

Jacqueline Hassink is printed heaven42 135g/m2, ­absolute white coated paper ­softmatt FSC

Martin Stöbich is printed on Soporset ­Premium Offset 120g/ m²

Maxime Ballesteros is printed on Circle Silk, 130g/ m², 100% recycled coated paper FSC

Larry Clark is printed on on ­Fluweel vol 1.5, 120g/m2, wood-free bright white wove ­bookpaper FSC

Antoine D’Agata is printed on Profibulk 1.1, 100g/m2, wood-free white bulky design paper FSC

Colophon Issue #35, Summer 2013 Editor-in-chief Marloes Krijnen

Creative Director Pjotr de Jong (Vandejong) Editors Marcel Feil, Pjotr de Jong, Elisa Medde, Marloes Krijnen

Managing Editor Elisa Medde

On My Mind

Editorial Assistant Eva Bremer

Editorial Intern Myrabelle Charlebois

Magazine Management Mirjam Lingen, Lout Coolen

foam magazine # 35 lust

Management Assistant Agata Bar

Communication Intern Julie van der Have

Art Director Hamid Sallali (Vandejong)

Design & Layout Hamid Sallali, M ­ arine Delgado (Vandejong) Typography Marine Delgado (Vandejong) Contributing Photographers and Artists Maxime Ballesteros, Larry Clark, Antoine d’Agata, Jacqueline Hassink, Mao Ishikawa, Paul Kooiker & Erik Kessels, Rico & Michael, Viviane Sassen, Martin Stöbich, Cornelie Tollens

Cover Photograph Ameena and Flowers, Berlin, 2011 © Maxime Ballesteros

Contributing Writers Merel Bem, Tim Clark, Marcel Feil, Marc Feustel, Matthias Harder, Sebastian Hau, Bill Kouwenhoven, Bernard Marcadé, Sean O’Toole, Francesco Zanot

Lithography & Printing Lecturis Kalverstraat 72 5642 CJ Eindhoven -NL Binding Binderij Hexspoor Ladonkseweg 7 5281 RN Boxtel – NL Paper Igepa Nederland B.V. De Geer 10 4004 LT Tiel - NL

Editorial Address Foam Magazine Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam – NL T +31 20 551 65 00 F +31 20 551 65 01 editors@foam.org

Operations Manager / Advertising Mirjam Lingen Foam Magazine PO Box 92292 1090 AG Amsterdam – NL T +31 20 462 20 62 F +31 20 462 20 60 mirjam@vandejong.nl Subscriptions Hexspoor Support Center Ladonkseweg 9 5281 RN Boxtel – NL T +31 41 163 34 71 subscription@foam.org Subscriptions include 4 issues per year € 70,– excluding postage Students and Club Foam members receive 20% discount Single issue € 19,50 Back issues (# 2 – 29) € 12,50 Excluding postage Foam Magazine # 1 and #9 are out of print www.foam.org / webshop

Publisher Foam Magazine PO Box 92292 1090 AG Amsterdam – NL magazine@foam.org ISSN 1570-4874 ISBN 978-90-70516-30-7 © photographers, authors, Foam Magazine BV, Amsterdam, 2012.

All photographs and illustration material is the copyright property of the photographers and /or their estates, and the publications in which they have been published.

Every effort has been made to con­ tact copyright holders. Any copy­ right holders we have been unable to reach or to whom inaccurate acknowledgement has been made are invited to contact the publishers at magazine@foam.org All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo-copy, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publishers.

Although the highest care is taken to make the information contained in Foam Magazine as accurate as possible, neither the publishers nor the authors can accept any responsibility for damage, of any nature, resulting from the use of this information.

Distribution The Netherlands Betapress BV T + 31 16 145 78 00 Great Britain Central Books magazine@centralbooks.com USA/ Canada/ Asia S.A.S.S Srl distribuzione@sass-roma.it T +39 0665000236

The production of Foam Magazine has been made possible thanks to the generous support of Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, paper supplier Igepa Netherlands B.V., Printing company Lecturis and Bindery Hexspoor.

Copy Editor Pittwater Literary Services: ­Rowan Hewison Translation Victoria Constable, Vivien D. Glass, Anne Hodgkinson, Liz Waters

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c-print, photo© Studio Wurm, Courtesy: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York

Erwin Wurm, Instructions on How to be Politically Incorrect: Spit in Someone’s Soup, 2003

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