photo-eye | BLOG: Kim Beil

Showing posts with label Kim Beil. Show all posts

Anonymous Objects
Inscrutable Photographs and the Unknown
By Kim Beil

SPBH Editions, 2023. 175 pp., 4x6".

"It’s easier to ignore things we do
not understand than it is to try to
capture and comprehend them.
This perceptual strategy may even
be an evolutionary necessity."

— Kim Beil, Anonymous Objects

inscrutable /in-skru-tə -bəl/: not readily investigated, interpreted or understood: mysterious

Photography is an extremely deceptive medium, but given its ubiquity, I think we are blind to most of what it offers. I am not sure how to calculate the number of photographs I see every day, but I reckon it’s in the thousands. For most people, I am afraid, the constant barrage of pictures we all experience allows us to think we understand what we see in photographs. Because of its accessibility, we’ve become complacent (or perhaps numb?), and too infrequently question our relationship to photography, readily assuming what we see is what we get. Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated. Every picture is full of ideas, intentions, circumstances, and objects we know nothing about. Part of the draw of photography is its ability to offer clear depictions of time and space, but I'm of the belief that the unknowable parts of a photograph are its most interesting and essential attributes. I think those of us weaned on darkroom photography can speak to that first, magical experience when we watched an image emerge in a tray of developer. Every day, despite how inundated I am with photographic information, I try to remember the fundamental mysteriousness that first drew me to the medium.

The new book by Kim Beil, Anonymous Objects, asks the reader to embrace and relish the mysteries of photography by taking note of the little, often unknowable, items that appear within its frames. The book is the fifth installment in the SPBH Essays series and is seemingly about the small objects that appear in photographs that we know nothing about, often just little things that fall outside the scope of our own experience. What do these objects represent if we don’t know what they are? Does that change how we understand a photograph? If we can’t identify an object depicted in a picture, what does it represent? Can we really know a picture if we can’t understand all that is held within it? When I got into photography, the first artist I really studied was Frederick Sommer, and as a result, I remain committed to the belief that the best photographs represent ideas beyond what is described in their frames (Sommer’s doll head is more Enochian than documentary). This is important, I think, when reading Anonymous Objects, because on the surface Beil is writing about specific attributes — those tiny things stacked out of the way on the top left shelf in Walker Evan’s photograph of a general store in the American South — but digging deeper between the lines, Beil is really creating an incredible labyrinth of ideas about what photographs can and cannot represent, like Sommer giving something well beyond a literal reading.

As many before her, Beil’s argument pays homage to Roland Barthes, his name and ideas appearing throughout her text:

“Photographs of unrecognizable
things produce a curious analog
to this ‘temporal hallucination’
that Barthes finds in portraits.
Studying inscrutable photographs,
we come face to face with our
own limits, just as Barthes faces
his own mortality when studying
a picture of a person.”

It had been a while since I read Camera Lucida, Barthes’s groundbreaking book on photography that questioned the very nature of the medium, and I found that revisiting it can shed some light on Anonymous Objects. First published in 1980, Camera Lucida is a personal narrative in which Barthes developed a free-form, stream-of-conscious text divided into small, discrete parts, each section its own meditation on photography. Throughout Camera Lucida, Barthes negotiates sophisticated ideas about pictures, language, symbolism, and representation, ultimately offering new conclusions about photographic images, and their infinite capacity to evoke personal experiences and cultural representations.

Beil’s Anonymous Objects offers something similar, a free-flowing text that breaks down the personal and cultural significance of photographs. Using the small, unknowable attributes of different pictures, Beil negotiates much more complex ideas about representation, time, and both personal and cultural symbolism. Part of what I love about Anonymous Objects is quite simple: how the text appears on the page; the design of the book dictates its meaning. Throughout the book, Beil dissects several different photographs, some iconic — like Alexander Gardner’s portraits of Lewis Payne before his execution and early souvenir photographs of George Washington’s home — as well as pictures collected from flea markets. As she deciphers these pictures, Beil knits together a larger narrative about the objects that appear in the photographs and how they impact our understandings. The design of the book, however, facilitates more poetic possibilities. Printed in a big, bold font that allows single sentences to fill an entire page, her phrases and ideas breakdown in an evocative manner, each encapsulating a distinct and succinctly described idea of its own (in sharing quotes from the book, I’ve transcribed them like they appear on the page, as though poetry not prose). You can read the book cover to cover to follow that larger train, but you can also open the book at random and find brief but mysterious ideas about photography. This approach replicates something I love about the medium itself — full of short, sharp, and clear ideas that somehow remain elusive and mysterious, presenting clear and wonderful ideas but also an unending array of ambiguity and questions.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

Swimmers. By Larry Sultan

Swimmers
Photographs by Larry Sultan

MACK, London, UK, 2023. 144 pp., 11¼x10¾".

In the late summer of 2020, before vaccines, before wildfires in California, but very much after the onslaught of the pandemic, I started going to a local pool. My fellow swimmers and I were checked-in, our temperatures taken and recent travel history surveyed. Then we walked out onto the pool deck, the sun still climbing behind a tall stand of eucalyptus trees. Another world was now within reach. We traded N95 masks for goggles and dove in.

It was the closest I’d come to being in a crowd for six months and I was surprised by the tenderness I felt for strangers, these creatures who’d suffered and survived, who were indeed still in the midst of surviving, as we all still are every day. You could mistake the subtle taste of the saltwater pool for tears.

We shared the small outdoor pool with an aqua aerobics class. The instructor curated new playlists for her students each day. Sometimes it was a Latin dance beat, other times it was Patsy Cline. On Halloween, I heard “The Monster Mash” before diving in. Underwater, the music evaporated. I watched the bodies try to move in unison. They were tentative, floating lightly on tip-toe, like babies in first-steps videotapes. They strained lightly and leapt slowly. It was comedic, but also poignant, the way the diffuse light made everything gently beautiful. Sharing public space together was an act of trust. Our bodies were fragile and solid and strong all at once.

The same sense of wonder colors Larry Sultan’s Swimmers, collected in a new book by Mack. Sultan worked on the series for around a decade, beginning in the early 1970s. He visited public swimming pools in the San Francisco Bay Area, photographing underwater with a Nikonos III. Philip Gefter’s enlightening introduction to the book places the series at a transitional point in Sultan’s career. He had published Evidence, with Mike Mandel, in 1977. Gefter notes that Sultan received some criticism from viewers at the time who accused him of formalism upon seeing Swimmers. They were disappointed by this subjective, nearly narrative turn from the conceptual artist. But, Gefter argues, it was crucial to the development of Pictures of Home, which is now arguably Sultan’s best-known work.

The Swimmers pictures are captivating. In the new book, they are printed in muted color on black pages. The sequence shows the recurring themes to great effect. Moving from solo swimmers to groups and back, the book is animated by that same sense of fascination I found underwater at the pool. The awkwardness of being in water strips away the years. We are children underwater; it seems to reveal our most basic facts, from the shapes of our bodies to our social rituals, made visible here by the way people cling to each other or struggle to hold themselves in place against the lightly rocking tide.

I realize in looking at Sultan’s pictures that it’s impossible to pose underwater. Literally out of our element, we can’t hold ourselves in the ways we want to. We can barely hold still. Even in the few pictures that feature eye contact, the swimmer is hardly smiling for the camera. All their effort is on breathing underwater, their lips pursed and eyes glassy.

The focus on the body is exaggerated by the fact that Sultan’s camera rarely breaks the surface. These swimmers are mostly anonymous Aphrodites without heads. But their humanity and the humanity of Sultan’s pictures is unmistakable. Submerged in this most vital element, Sultan revealed something vital and fragile about human beings. The people in these pictures appear timeless, despite the fact that Sultan’s Apollos wear Speedos instead of togas.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Kim Beil is an art historian who teaches at Stanford University. She is the author of Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography.

The Pencil of Nature. By Yvonne Venegas

The Pencil of Nature
Photographs by Yvonne Venegas

Rm, 2023. 116 pp., 80 illustrations, 6¼x9½".

The story starts with a snake. Yes, that story. The one about the woman and man and the garden and the apple; the one about desire and knowledge and shame and punishment. But there’s another story too. This one starts in the photo studio owned by Yvonne Venegas’s parents in provincial Mexico. Here, the snake is wrapped around the leg of a model, Nastassja Kinski. The snake flicks its tongue, touching the model’s ear. The photographer finally gets the picture. The picture becomes a poster. That poster hung over the table where Venegas sat to do her homework as a young girl.

The story, as Venegas tells it in her brilliant new photobook, is also a story about power and control. Venegas saw both in the woman posing for the photograph; these attributes offered a counterweight to what Venegas saw in other pictures of women, particularly the bridal pictures she saw as a girl. As Venegas recalls, the wedding day was framed as the most important day of a young woman’s life. One of the most vocal directors of that scene was the photographer, who instructed the bride in everything from how to gaze at her parents to how to apply perfume behind her ears. Although these gestures may not seem important, the bride’s submission to them was symbolic. As Venegas writes, “In that city, in those years, women did not own their bodies. In the same way that the photographer directed the bride on her wedding day, they blindly entered into a contract that, seen from my child’s eyes, was not fair.”

In an illuminating essay at the heart of the book, Venegas focuses on Kinski, the model, when retelling the story of the snake. At the periphery of the story and outside the shot, are Richard Avedon and Vogue’s creative director, Polly Allen. This subtle reframing towards shared authorship is central to Venegas’ project.

After Venegas took up the camera herself, she wondered: was she perpetuating that imbalance of power established by photography’s association with male domination? What about when she directed the poses of women who appear in her photographs? What had Venegas herself learned about photography and femininity at the direction of men?

The book begins with a series of self-portraits, in which Venegas wears a three-piece suit and poses in ways that amplify the costume’s typical gender presentation. She feels the architecture and the history of the suit shaping her posture; she likes the feeling of taking up space, of being in control. She becomes characters in well-known photographs, reinventing images by Man Ray and others, even as she plays their poses with a difference. A pose, she writes, “is an idea that is expressed with the body.” That idea, which Venegas explores through formally elegant and emotionally layered photographs, is about knowledge — of both the self and others — and, therefore, power.

What if, Venegas wonders, the women in her photographs could also be knowing participants? And, what if they could be many people? Could Venegas show them playing multiple roles at once? Can one person be many things, many people? The answer is definitively: yes, and more.

These experiments unfold across the book’s several sections. After Venegas’ self-portraits (some printed at photobooth thumbnail size on black pages, which cleverly resist the gaze), come a series of portraits of more than two dozen different women. Each spread is accompanied by hundreds of names for the roles they’ve played, whether in their professional acting careers or in daily lives: “singer,” “architect,” “small-town girl,” “revolutionary,” “mother,” “daughter,” “wife.” Many of the roles overlap or repeat and the reader cannot know whether the noun on the page refers to a character on stage or to one of the many roles that women play without preparation, simply because they exist in the world. The list equalizes any difference between acted or natural parts. Quickly, it becomes clear that these are all roles. They are all played. None is more natural than another. As the twentieth-century sociologist Irving Goffman wrote in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, we are not the same person across all areas of our life. When we sit down in a diner or a doctor’s office, on the couch of a friend or a therapist, we play a different version of ourselves.

Photographs are a strange version of this stagecraft not only because they circulate widely, sometimes far beyond their intended audiences, but also because they are the product of two visions of a person coming together. During the portrait sessions for this book, Venegas describes engaging in conversations about posing with the women who stood before her lens. The photographer and the photographed were deliberately working together to produce an image of a character. In other words, they were reclaiming the pose as a pose. Rather than adopting a posture or a gesture as a marker of some generalized feminine role, like the submissive gaze at the parents in small-town wedding portraits, Venegas and the women she photographed were consciously deconstructing the elements of each pose and revealing their artifice.

In these portraits, Venegas and her sitters are taking a bite of the apple. They’re making knowledge visible by breaking down the demands of naturalness that have accompanied photographic portraiture since the nineteenth century. Like looking at a Sherrie Levine photograph of a Walker Evans portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, suddenly we’re forced to ask: what if someone else took this picture? Specifically, a woman? Except here, in Venegas’ book, we don’t have to wonder. We can see.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Kim Beil is an art historian who teaches at Stanford University. She is the author of Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography.

Him. By Alice Zukofsky

Him
Photographs by Alice Zukofsky

Gato Negro Ediciones, Mexico City, Mexico, 2019. Unpaginated, black-and-white illustrations, 4¼x5¾x½".

Alice Zukofsky’s Him, a Riso-printed book by Gato Negro Ediciones, speaks directly to the hands. Its chalky-smooth paper cover feels comfortable, worn in. The French-fold pages flip easily, like a deck of cards. Instead of the slow and stately procession of glossy pages that many contemporary hardcover photobooks demand, this book begs to be thumbed through, maybe even at speed. As the pages flip by, it creates an ambiance, a mysterious aura, not unlike the fantasy world of Chris Marker’s slideshow film La Jetée.

But the minute I sat down to write about it, I was struck with uncertainty. What are the pictures of? And, failing that, who is the photographer?

The book’s promotional materials bear an enigmatic blurb: “chronicle of a long night.” Indeed, the images are replete with darkness, the inky Risograph pages dense with shadow. One type of image recurs: a silver circle on a black ground. The circle seems to be filled with organic matter, reminiscent of Irving Penn’s cigarette butts. The publisher’s biography of Zukofsky — “Photographer and Mychologist [sic]” — tips the imagery in another direction. Do they depict the base of mushrooms, recently pulled from the earth? There’s more circular imagery — a stain, a pill broken on a sidewalk, the shield of a warrior in a marble frieze. The book concludes in a field of long grasses.

There aren’t many photographs that so fully resist words. In Alison Rossiter’s abstractions, writers lovingly catalogue the vintage materials that she sources on eBay. In Ellen Carey or Walead Beshty’s color abstractions, critics focus on the process of working with giant sheets of color paper in the dark.

Abstraction in photography isn’t exactly new. What, after all, is that jumble of shapes and shadows in the Nièpce plate, referred to as “the first photograph” and created around 1826? With a little help from the title, “View from the Window at Le Gras,” the mind sees the angles and says, “Roof.” Its vagueness is not the result of fading; scientists now understand that the picture was underexposed. There must have been other pictures that got too little light or too much, pictures that faded or shifted, pictures made accidentally, pictures that bloomed with chemical spills or reactions to light. But, when you put words to any of these, they become something. They lose everything when they’re no longer nothing.

So, the problem isn’t with photography. Photography can resist words. It’s writing that can’t. What do you say when you’re not sure what you see? Most critics focus on the artist. But, what happens when the artist is as elusive as her pictures?

This is what the publisher told me about Alice Zukofsky: “Interested in the microcosm and the planets beyond, Zukofsky’s travels have taken her on a journey across the world, having lived, studied, and worked, in places like Tanger [sic], Paris, Kolkata, La Habana, Buenos Aires, until she got to Mexico City in the mid nineties where she met her life-long friend and mentor, Leonora Carrington, and from where she hasn’t moved ever since.” On the surface, there is detail: a map of places, an artistic lineage. But, as soon as you pull the strands, they come loose, like soil crumbling.

Carrington, in her 1974 surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet, described a room in which the furniture was painted, trompe l’oeil, on the walls. Like Zukofsky’s photographs, the images in Carrington’s novel are glancing dream-like pictures of the world, which dissolve when you try to hold them. It’s entirely appropriate that this book, which revels in the tactile, also resists identification with the three-dimensional world. There is a ground, but you can’t stand on it.

I was drawn to the depths and to the surface of this book simultaneously. It begs to be touched. It celebrates surface. The thick black pigment of the Risograph process promises depth, even as it denies access. In Mexico City where I first laid hands on it in the spring of 2022, most stores were still enforcing a sticky squirt of hand-sanitizer. The world has been a waking nightmare over the past two years. There are deadly, invisible, but natural forces that threaten our very being. The picture of this world shifts weekly. It is a mythic tale, telling and retelling itself like a crumbling landslide. Scientists are cast as mythic heroes. Their task is to debunk folk remedies straight out of a Carrington surrealist satire. As Luis Buñuel said of Carrington’s novel, “The Hearing Trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days.”

Zukofsky’s book is likewise liberatory. It frees us from the realm of sense, of reference, of index: those stark lands of photographic non-fiction. Instead, this book is a new land where touch can be fantastical, dreamlike, otherworldly. Will we see more from Zukofsky? The publisher’s biography concludes inconclusively: “Rumours of her presumed death have been increasing since her last public appearance in 2011.”

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Kim Beil is an art historian who teaches at Stanford University. She is the author of Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography.

Instructional Photography.

By Carmen Winant

Instructional Photography
Learning How to Live Now
Artist's book by Carmen Winant

SPBH Editions, 2021. 96 pp., 48 illustrations, 4¼x5¾x½".

Carmen Winant coins a novel term, “Instructional Photography,” with the title of her new book. Her neologism is so apt that it doesn’t even strike me as new. The term is as forthright and instrumental as the photographs themselves.

Winant collects, collages, and re-presents photographs from how-to manuals in this book, as in her larger practice. There are instructions in aerobics, ceramics and rock climbing, as well as pictures from the literature of medicine and sexuality. The key feature of an instructional photograph is its promised relation to a viewer’s body. In long view and in close-up, models demonstrate their tasks. Their bodies stand-in for the viewer’s body. We are meant to mirror their poses, whether learning how to shape pottery or practice self-defense.

It’s a small book that makes a big claim: that instructional photographs don’t just teach viewers how to accomplish a given task, but that, as a whole, the genre is a guide to living. As Winant puts it in the subtitle, they are a guide for “Learning How To Live Now.”

Immediately her tone is convincing: “In a moment — we might agree? — of heightened anxiety and re-imagination, I want, on these pages and together, to investigate the potential of photography to teach us how to live.” I cannot resist her first-person plural aside, nor the insistence of her italics. I do agree; I want to learn. Like John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Winant makes her point through the combined rhetorical logic of words and pictures. She uses the form of the how-to book — a small, hand-held object — to emphasize its familiarity. We are, in effect, reading an instructional book about instructional photography.

Winant’s argument is bigger, though, than just defining the genre. She suggests that all photographs are instructional. She asks, “Don’t artists too believe we have something to ‘teach’ with and through our work?”

With all the visual intelligence of a photobook editor, Winant’s page breaks underscore her argument in words and pictures. Like a poet, Winant gets in your head. Like instructional photographs themselves, the interaction demanded by her book — read the words, turn the page, read the images as words — makes this promise real. In neuroscience, this relationship between bodies is described as kinesthetic empathy. Watching a body perform a task, we can feel the motion in our own bodies. In Winant’s book, this is most effective in the full-bleed sequences that unfold over several pages. Like the still photographs that take on a sense of movement in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, photographs of a woman seated and back-lit on a patio become uncannily live as I turn the pages.

Winant amplifies this experience of connection by giving the viewer control over the pacing. You turn the page, you create the movement, you decide to go forward or backwards in time. You also choose to inhabit the image, to imagine yourself into it. There’s a powerful movement from self-recognition to self-actualization in these images. Winant admits that such grand hopes for photographs are often dismissed as “didactic” in art school. They are too obvious.

But, what they also do — and what Winant’s book does — is make a gift of themselves. They are literally self-sacrificing, in that they make an image of the self available to others. They promise the image of the body as a container, a shelter for others to inhabit. But they are also endlessly renewable. I might inhabit this body for a moment in my mind, I might feel its sensations in my own body, but it’s also available to others who study it. We can try on new ways of doing and new ways of being with others in the world through instructional photography. I agree; ‘in a moment… of heightened anxiety and re-imagination,’ I hungrily turn to art like Winant’s for instruction in life.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Kim Beil is an art historian who teaches at Stanford University. She is the author of Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography.

How to Look Natural in Photos.

By Beata Bartecka & Łukasz Rusznica.

How to Look Natural in Photos
Curated by Beata Bartecka & Łukasz Rusznica

Palm* & OPT, 2021. 304 pp., 7¾x10½".

How To Look Natural in Photographs comes out of a 2014 exhibition curated by Beata Bartecka and Łukasz Rusznica, which featured surveillance photographs made by Polish secret police during the Communist Era. The duo discovered the photographs, and thousands more, in Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance. The book expands on the exhibition with a remarkable sequence of images and an illuminating essay by the historian Tomasz Stempowski.

The book takes its title from an instructional manual used to train officers in making mugshots. The secret police guide suggests that mugshots are best taken by surprise, so that subjects don’t have the opportunity to alter their facial expressions. A natural-looking expression makes people more easily identifiable to surveillance officers on the street. The guide warns: “Even slightly puffed-out cheeks, retraction or protrusion of the chin, or a grimace may cause changes in appearance.” Most chilling is the recommendation to make the subject comfortable in front of the camera; this mirrors exactly the advice given to photographers creating any kind of portrait. Naturalness has been prized in portraits since the nineteenth century, but this book reveals that the goals of accurate, naturalistic representation can be used to achieve varied ends. The book, and especially Stempowski’s essay, is rich with moments like this where photography reveals itself to be a tool that can be used equally for good or evil.

The secret police photography program began in 1946, concentrating first on photographing known subjects under surveillance, before expanding to include the general surveillance of Polish citizens in 1950. Photographic procedures were standardized in 1956 and a 10-week training course was developed to prepare agents for their photographic assignments. The officers had training in photographing altercations and people entering or exiting buildings, all subjects that appear frequently in the book. Stempowski also notes that the “surveillance section was often criticized for its lack of skill in producing actionable photographs.” There are many prints of peoples’ backs, some of which are labeled with grease-pencil numbers, which seem to uncannily mark them for punishment.

The image sequence is rich and evolving. Without accompanying text, many of the photographs seem innocuous at first. The book begins with an interior in a small cottage marred by mold or abrasions on the print surface. These white blooms are followed by a bouquet of white flowers, then a blonde boy sitting next to crates of Coca Cola. Then a pile of men’s boots next to an open safe. Bartecka and Rusznica intersperse mundane shots of evidence with images of people, sometimes photographed surreptitiously, sometimes in mugshots. At first the book is reminiscent of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s Evidence, full of mystery and strange play. But, there are also photographs in How To Look Natural In Photographs that make it shockingly, irrevocably real: an apparently headless body in a wheelbarrow, many officers displaying wounds, more disfigured corpses. These pictures are all the more poignant for being set alongside the banal images of evidence: a jacket, a telephone pole, a briefcase.

As Stempowski argues, these photographs now represent a crucial chapter in the country’s collective memory. Not only do they document how the country suffered under Communist rule, but they also document the country period. Whereas in the US, there are scores of archival images that document periods of protest and civil unrest, whether its Dorothea Lange’s photographs of the General Strike in San Francisco or photographs of the Civil Rights movement. In Poland, outside of family photographs, national events are remembered by propaganda photos. The book is an unsettling and necessary reminder of photography’s complicity in these deadly decades.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Kim Beil is an art historian who teaches at Stanford University. She is the author of Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography.

Social Media