SERAFIN GERBER ON RYAN MCGINLEY & FERDINAND HODLER

Ryan McGinley, Sparky.

Afterimage by Serafin Gerber:

I am on a journey to find the image in my head. I haven't reached the bottom, but I'm on it. I took the assignment literally: what's the image you see when you close your eyes? So I lay down, closed my eyes, and looked. Not one image came, but many.

I'm a melancholic person, especially in summer (I’m writing this in July); every new one makes me feel time passing, and I think of past summers, miss what has been. The older I get, the more I think: I used to be so young, so free, everything felt light, endless, limitless. Now it all feels heavier, more serious. This feeling hits me every summer.

There's a contrast in it. On one side I'm fully present, swimming in a river under this exact sun, hyper-real, right here, right now. But then it layers with every summer before it. It results in this sort of mental time travel, this longing for what has been, this slight fear of what's coming. The very moment becomes a timeline. Saturated, both ways at once.

I grew up in the countryside, so visually summer to me means saturated colour, late evening light lying horizontal and warm, fields, meadows, the wind in them, rivers, hills, mountains.

I have this ritual I do every time I swim: I dive, open my eyes underwater, and swim toward the sun looking straight at it, watching the light break. Full steam summer evening light, running super fast, close friends, warm beer—this is where freedom lives, where everything feels possible. Wide space, the sky, closeness, intimacy, melancholy.

Three images came out of it, layered.

The most photographic one is Ryan McGinley's early work—fireworks, figures shot against the sun. It's the same gesture: looking into the sun through water, that closeness, that youth. His images breathe. Everything is here at once. I found his work years ago, forgot about it, and it came back to me while I was trying to name this feeling—the wide lens, people close together, fireworks or sun, small flares of light. Not many photographs move me the way his do.

Ferdinand Hodler, Sonnenuntergang auf dem Genfer See, 1915.

The second is Ferdinand Hodler, a Swiss painter—lakes, forests, streams, rocks, his light. Figures holding each other by the hand. I can't name one painting; it's the colour and the light matching what I feel, not any single image.

The third is the sunrise emoji. I use it constantly. A small square that is also an image.

These three layer into what I see right now when I close my eyes. Together, they are my inner world right now. Not a concise answer to a simple question. The word for it might be saudade—the presence of an absence. Longing for something that isn't here now.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.

TORBJØRN RØDLAND ON DIM REVELATIONS

Following the recent release of Dim Revelations, The 2013 Journal, we present two interviews in which Rødland speaks about the book and his photographic process.

Torbjørn Rødland, Hot Dog, 2013, 28 x 35 cm.

Dark Revelations, D2
By Maja Hattvang

Torbjørn Rødland publishes his diary from 2013 and gives a rare insight into his own photographic process.

In 2013, photographic artist Torbjørn Rødland decided to write. A small piece of text every day, sometimes about photography as an art form, sometimes about his own process ("I got up early and put striped toothpaste on a frankfurter in a wheat bun, right here on the floor"), sometimes about films he watches, Edvard Munch's understanding of hell, or the joy of a fully charged electrical device.

"My best thinking is wordless," he writes, for example, on January 8: "I'm a photography-thinker, which is not quite a thinker." Nevertheless, the entries carry the same shifting between high and low, sincerity and irony that characterizes his photographs.

The idea was always that it would be published, but only now, 13 years later, has Dim Revelations, The 2013 Journal arrived.

"The year 2013 very quickly looked very outdated," says Rødland, who recently moved from Los Angeles to New York. "I had to wait until we could look at the year from a certain distance."

The book is part of Objektiv Press's essay series on camera-based art, and offers a rare glimpse into Rødland's photographic process, which tends to depend on a combination of thorough preparation and intuition.

Halfway through the year, he comes across, by chance, the American author Ken Wilber's so-called integral theory: a kind of synthesis of Eastern and Western, new and old knowledge traditions. It has a tremendously productive effect on his thinking around his own work.

"When I studied photography in Bergen, you were either straight, subjective and poetic, or you were staged, appropriating and critical. Only the latter of these two positions had validity, but it wasn't inclusive enough for me. I needed the poetic and the subjective, but I couldn't ignore the staged and the critical," he says.

"I knew that what I was searching for wasn't a nostalgic image, but I had no suitable concepts. What I wanted to do didn't exist, and therefore had no name."

This was what he found in Wilber's ideas: a concept that encompassed all layers of meaning at once.

Rødland's photographs tend to be perfectly lit, sometimes bordering on softcore or advertisement-like in their choice of subject matter, and haven't always been read in the multi-layered way he himself works from.

"Is it about a need to be understood?"

"Understood. Seen. Mostly on behalf of the images. I'm painfully aware that I fall short as a communicator. But stronger than the need to be understood is my own need to understand."

The 2013 Journal: Torbjørn Rødland, Daily Lazy
By Koshik Zaman

K.Z: This is an honor. I very much enjoyed reading your brand new book Dim Revelations: The 2013 Journal, which is based on diary entries from that year. I chuckled several times, and I loved all the references and insights. According to the preface, you had not kept a diary before 2013, or after, for that matter. What prompted you to start then? Why was that year particularly suited to this?

Torbjørn Rødland: In 2011 I published twenty sentences on photography, and the response I got to that text encouraged me to write more. I was in Scandinavia without my equipment over the 2012 Christmas holidays and decided to start writing on January 1.

K.Z: Out of curiosity, why did you leave out Sundays?

TR: I like the biblical concept of taking Sundays off. It makes a lot of sense to me.

K.Z: Right, you allude to that in one of the entries where you mention Roe Ethridge. What did an ideal Sunday look like then?

TR: Not so different from all the other days. I just didn't have to come up with a paragraph for the journal. A Sunday could be a great day for, say, making a picture.

K.Z: The format is intimate, very reminiscent of a notebook, and fits well within Objektiv Press' essay series. Had you always intended for it to be published, or did that idea come later?

TR: The idea was always to publish it, and the question was always when.

K.Z: So why is now a good time to publish it?

TR: I'm not sure it is. Objektiv Press asked very nicely for a contribution to their book series, and this journal was the best unpublished "essay" I could find on my PowerBook. A lot of people look back at the years leading up to 2016 as a different reality, so maybe 2013 is finally ripe for a revisit. Things and times have definitely changed.

Excerpts from Dim Revelations:

04/26

I think I'm violating the portrait image. They think I'm violating the portrayed person.

06/01

Sexual tension is either projection, telepathy, or a combination of the two.

10/30

A photographer is someone who has grown to love the limitations of her camera.

K.Z: It's evident that you're a talented and very witty writer. Have you not felt compelled to keep writing?

TR: No. Every generation produces a lot of writers who do it better than me, but there is a lack of exciting photographers.

K.Z: Returning to the project more than a decade later, are there any entries that made you think, "I would not write that today"?

TR: Certain artistic approaches that felt tired to me in 2013 are receiving less positive attention today, so I probably wouldn't feel the need to throw shade in those directions. I'm older and would generally throw less shade now, though I repeatedly went there because, as a reader, I'm excited by that type of frankness. I'm drawn to the directness in Edmund Wilson's diaries, perhaps forgetting that they weren't published until after his death.

K.Z: For a contemporary art audience, an introduction is almost redundant. You are one of the leading figures in contemporary photography, and your mise-en-scène approach has clearly

influenced many younger artists. I would still love to ask how you first got started in photography.

TR: I grew up with a father who read amateur photography magazines. He gave me a camera when I was maybe eleven. At that time I was already a dedicated cartoonist, but when that spark expired in my late teens, I transferred my love of image-making to photography. I never seriously considered painting.

K.Z: I read somewhere that you have also worked with video and film, which I was not aware of at all. I believe some of those works were made before you moved to Los Angeles. Has living in the city not inspired you to revisit those mediums? Reading the book, it's evident that you're very interested in film.

TR: Moving to Los Angeles in 2010, I thought the next step would be to make a movie long enough to cross over into the world of cinema, but Hollywood diminished rather than strengthened that appetite. Last year I moved away from California. Let's see if the hunger returns. I won't tell you my genre-bending idea for a feature-length film, as it has still not been attempted by anyone else.

K.Z: Finally, what is left for you to explore? You've exhibited widely, in blue-chip galleries and world-renowned institutions alike. What still excites or challenges you?

TR: Oh, I'm not as impressed by the reception as you seem to be. Have you ever seen one of my exhibitions? Very few have. In my mind, it's just getting started. It will be a long process. What else is exciting? There are still a lot of possible photographic images that just aren't being created. I'll try to make some of them.

NINA STRAND ON MATIAS FALDBAKKEN

En opprettholdelse / Upholdong (2026), Matias Faldbakken. Photo by Niklas Hart / KORO.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

And then, there it is. Fifteen years after the terrorist attacks in Oslo and on Utøya: Upholding, the national memorial for July 22. A towering steel structure as a protest against forgetting.

Those who live in Oslo will likely remember the large steel rig built to preserve Pablo Picasso's The Fishermen from the demolished Y-block. This inspired the artist, who filled this new structure with a mosaic work whose motif is from the island of Utøya. We see a wading bird, a common redshank typical of the area around the island, and some reeds and twigs reflected in the water. The other side of the sculpture is painted in the same red as Utøya's speakers' platform, can function as an open wound

The rig itself refers to what happened in the government quarter, and the motif to what happened on Utøya; the work thus becomes a bridge between the two horrific events. In the description of the work, the artist states that the rig that protected Picasso's work ‘appeared as an essential object from the transitional phase between the old and new government quarter, and further, a Norway before and after the attack.’

The placement is also significant: when standing in front of the mosaic, one looks towards Utøya, with only a couple of degrees' deviation. According to the artist, the mosaic functions in this way both as a window and as a screen, echoing Vilém Flusser: ‘The image is a screen which hides what it means.’

Co-creating the work with survivors and the bereaved underscored its inclusive dimension. Many were invited to place the mosaic together with the artist, among them teenagers who were not yet born when the terrorist acts took place. As one of them put it, we are the future, and it is important that we know what we want to do with it.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.

RUTH ANDERWALD ON ALEC SOTH

Alec Soth, A couple off of Nome's beachfront, Alaska, 2015.

Afterimage by Ruth Anderwald:

What is the image that is always at the back of my mind, on the inside of my eyelids? When thinking about this, I realised that my thinking in images puts them in relation to each other, and that my afterimage is somehow overlaid imagery. When I tried digging deeper, I realized the image that I'm yearning for is one that I have to make — my next project. It's been a really interesting self-discovery journey, this task of thinking about an afterimage.

Nevertheless, I will propose an image that exists, made by a really well-known photographer. It is Alec Soth's A Couple off Nome's Beachfront, Alaska, from 2015. You see a couple standing on a small piece of ice; one of them has crutches, and they hug each other. There is only this — the ice, the couple, and the blue sea.

There are several elements that I connect to in this image. One is that, with all the problems that we have in the world right now, constantly on our minds whenever we open (or don't open) the newspapers, we are perpetually aware of a certain level of pressure that exists. And the way I think about it, and the way I connect this image to it, is that we only have each other as humanity. This is it. We have only us, and we need to connect with each other. That's our only way of managing, of moving on, of creating. Connected to that is a kind of wonderment: how have we survived as humanity for so long without creating a sustainable way of coexisting? I mean, how did we even manage to end up here? It's crazy. I see a lot of these things in that couple on the ice sheet, also in connection with climate change.

And then I think what stands out is that this is a part of Alaska that was part of the gold rush of the early 20th century, taken away from Indigenous people — erasing their culture and values, or at least trying to. So, a lot of things come together in this image.

My thinking has revolved a lot around coexistence lately, and what art and artistic thinking can teach us — also artistic practice and photographic practice. There are performative aspects to photography. One is the bodily presence of the photographer and the subjects: how their presence is impressed upon the photographer and vice versa. The presence of a camera changes the setting and allows for different things to emerge. And then, of course, photography makes things visible and is therefore used a lot in activism, making visible things that would otherwise remain hidden. I think there is a lot in the medium of photography, but also in the way that we as artists manage to survive — building relationships, grasping opportunities, and trying to build up not only careers for ourselves, because this wouldn't work alone; we also create networks to sustain each other and deal with things together.

This is the performativity that art has. It can nudge you to think differently, to engage, to act. In Austria, the climate of discussion is so heated right now that even people who agree on a lot of things don't talk to each other anymore. I think we should have more burning questions to raise and more pressing challenges to address than to stop speaking to a person because they might see certain things differently. It's so strange. Each other is all we have.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.

YUE CHEN ON GERTRUDE KÄSEBIER

Gertrude Käsebier, The Manger, circa 1900.

Afterimage by Yue Chen:

I have always liked the idea of photography as a way of lending private eyes and feelings to every moment. This because a photographer, guided by a genuine feeling for the moment, can render their subject with a rare dignity and tenderness that would otherwise be unseen, especially across time.

Lately, I am beginning to feel a deep urge to genuinely attend every moment I choose, and to consciously infuse my care into the people and things I hold dear. Attuning oneself to these fleeting instances feels like a deeply photographic act. The moments we live for, or survive on, have a way of staying with us if we just pay closer attention to how they feel in real time. It is a way to hold them close so that they become permanent architecture within us, like rocks standing firm in a river, keeping us from being swept away.

I recently came across this photograph again while looking at Camera Work and felt its grounding power. It is a photograph made by Gertrud Käsebier, a leading Pictorialist and a key figure in the Photo-Secession, a fin-de-siècle movement organized by Alfred Stieglitz to establish photography as an art form on par with painting, with ambitions spanning both Europe and America. Titled The Manger, the photograph references the widely known Nativity scene of Mary wrapping Jesus in swaddling clothes and placing him in a manger. However, the compelling nature of the image lies in its indexicality, a quality unique to photography that distinguishes it from painting. The very fact that real people served as models for these holy figures made the scene take on a palpable, lifelike presence.

To the viewer with no prior knowledge of its art-historical context, the picture strips back to the most fundamental act behind the camera: under the beautiful light, a woman in a white gown holding a baby in a rustic barn-like environment. A sense of mystery pervades the image. One cannot quite discern the features of the woman, whose side profile is softened by a haze-like blur. Yet, one can feel her strong presence in the picture and her attentiveness to the baby, an intimacy that seems to shut out the rest of the world, oblivious to everything around her. And to me, that is the very presentation of maternal love. That is what makes the picture touching. It is not about a relationship re-enacted for the camera, but real relationships as they exist in the world.  And you can sense that it is about motherhood without being told. The image hinges on a chain of attentive gazes: from the photographer to her subject, and from the mother to her child. It derives from the knowledge of motherhood that comes from the photographer, being a mother of three.

By 1899, this was the most ever paid for a photograph. It certainly was related to its religious motif and photography being the new art form, but also all of the above. Her promotion of photography as a viable career for women stemmed directly from her dedication to her own values. I looked into her biography and envisioned what it was possibly like for her, how she was standing in a slightly different position from the Photo-Secession movement as it developed and wanted to make different pictures for her family. Sometimes you will encounter this photograph flipped in both directions on the internet, or see it through varied digital scans of prints that have been preserved to different levels. The various states of the photograph make even clearer what makes it truly valuable: it is the touch of love that anchors it against time.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.

DUANE MICHALS

Afterimage-interview by Nina Strand:

It was inspiring to learn, when interviewing Michals in 2016, that he, at the age of 83, had made his first films. These were created for his exhibition Sequences & Talking Pictures at DC Moore Gallery in New York, which featured a number of his short films, or ‘mini-movies’ as Michals called them. The show also included posters for the films and several of his earlier picture sequences from the 1960s and 1970s.

‘A new illiteracy of images is being born,’ he said, ‘and this is the result of the illiteracy of a culture with pretend language and pretend emotions. The images people are being presented with don’t demand much.´ Donald Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of one-line-insult intellectual discourse. Trump is the ultimate destination of the trivialisation of language and meaning.

He said he didn’t pay much attention to photography as a field, feeling peripheral to PHOTOGRAPHY. However, because he loves the medium, he remains thoughtful and critical about its possibilities and limitations. He has always enjoyed literature and poetry, in some ways more than photography, because writing conjures up an imaginary universe that you share with the writer and help create. Photography is defined by the facts it represents. ‘It doesn’t float in the air the way poetry does.’ De Chirico and Magritte are both poetic painters who play with facts, yet contradict them with mystery, in his opinion.

Years ago, he saw a photograph of a young man on crutches. His leg was in a cast, he had no shirt on, and he was standing at home, leaning in a doorway. Michals was deeply moved by his vulnerability, his future possibilities as a man, and his fragility. Although he has never specifically copied this image, it has crept into his work as part of how he perceives life.

Perhaps some of this can be seen in his work The Unfortunate Man, which is currently included in the exhibition Fragile beauté. Photographies de la collection de Sir Elton John et David Furnish, at Jeu de Paume, along with other works by Michals.

Interview with Duane Michals published in the essaybook Perpetual Photographs, 2020.