THORA DOLVEN BALKE
I look forward to the time I can step outside this moment and find a language to describe it from a distance, right now it just swallows me whole.
CAMILLA REYMAN
Camilla Reyman, What day is it?, 2020.
I have been debating with my self for years wether my obsession with the square was ok, and in these times of confinement I finally feel it is an appropriate subject/object to engage in ◼️◼️◼️.
LUKE STETTNER
Luke Stettner collaborated with his darkroom photography students from Ohio State University during a zoom class session. Together and at once across their screens, they held up concrete and abstract nouns in response to the time we are living through. Grace Advent, Enrique Arayata, Ryan Braun, Margaret Derrig, Sumner Dobrava, Sarah Estes, Ella Feng, Jeramey Frelin, Jet Ni, Luke Stettner, Connor Yoho, Zhuoran Zhang.
SOLVEIG LØNSETH
Visual Wanderings
Objektiv has initiated a new series of works, Visual Wanderings, made especially for our online journal. We are inviting photographers from all over the world to create art that responds to our new situation: what does the lock-down mean for their work, what is important for them to convey, and what are their reflections on the time to come?
Contributions can take any form, from a photograph to words, a series of pictures or a meme. Each photographer will then be asked to pick another artist to create a work. The works don’t have be related to each other, but we want them to reflect how the virus informs their work and life. In this way, we will create a visual dialogue that runs across many different countries, in order to get a bigger picture of how this crisis and its aftermath are playing out for artists all over the world.
To present these visual wanderings, here is a photographic text by Solveig Lønset. (Opened in the Dark, Close in Light.) Take care.
VIBEKE TANDBERG
Vibeke Tandberg, Old Man Going Up and Down a Staircase, 2003.
Afterimage by Jocelyn Allen:
I’m currently pregnant, and I’ve never been before, so it’s a big change for me and my body. I have photographed myself for over 10 years and at the moment I am working on a series about my pregnancy. As a result, I have been looking to see how other women have photographed themselves during this time, as well as post-birth, and early motherhood.
A series that sticks out in my mind is Vibeke Tandberg’s Old Man Going Up and Down a Staircase (2003). In the work she is pregnant and dressed as an old man with a mask on. I imagine she did this to playfully talk about the restrictions and difficulties that pregnancy can present. Tasks that were once simple like walking up and down the stairs become more difficult, but with pregnancy it is often only a temporary change. I like this series as it is quite different to other work that I have seen. It is playful whilst commenting about something very relatable that might ring true to you even if you have never been pregnant, but experienced something else like having a broken bone or feeling rough after a night out.
Tandberg’s work makes me think about my grandmother when I visit her house. She wants to do things for me as I am pregnant, but it is difficult for her because of the changes to her body now that she is older. She says she will make me breakfast, but instead I make her breakfast as I know it is much easier for me to do it. She gets frustrated whilst going shopping and everyone opens doors for her as it makes her feel like she looks old, whilst I get irritated by people meaning well but telling me to eat and rest well, like I have forgotten the basic needs of being human.
I am currently about halfway in my pregnancy and my movements are becoming more restricted. Picking something up off the floor requires some repositioning and my days of putting my socks on whilst balanced on one foot will soon be paused (this morning I did one, but gave in and sat on the bed for the other one). I know that even though my body will probably never be the same again, I will be able to do these simple things again. Whereas for my grandmother these changes are now permanent and her ability to do these things will only get worse.
ERIN SHIRREFF
Afterimage by Erin Shireff:
I was working at a desk sometime in the mid 2000s, back in Brooklyn after graduate school, endlessly scrolling through Gawker.com as I tried to avoid thinking about the vague direction of my life when this image rolled onto my desktop screen, no accompanying text, carrying the header “Ghost in the Machine.”
It was a typical Gawker post — New York-centric, slightly caustic — and it hit me in the way it was likely intended. I probably laughed. But the picture itself, a low-fi cell phone snap taken quickly (maybe on a Blackberry?), it stayed with me and provoked something less formed, more ambient in my mind.
After a beat you get that this isn’t documentation of a performance, the person in the photo isn’t pulling a prank. It’s likely a picture of one of the many, many people living in New York who don’t have a home, who use the subway as a place to sleep or rest. Someone trying to get just a bit of privacy within a life that probably affords them very little. So it felt wrong, or problematic, to think of this being a “relatable gesture” but I did. And I do. Abstract the conditions of this life I can’t imagine through a degraded photo on a website and I remember how when I first moved to the city from the desert I felt physically damaged, daily, by the number of faces — eyes — I had to see each day. Most days I felt enormously, thrillingly anonymous but that feeling could tip when the wave of humanity became a sea of individual people. Eventually I acclimated or maybe I just numbed out. Maybe I was already part way there when I looked at this picture and laughed.
It makes me think, too, about how I fetishize privacy. I am alone in my studio most of the day and I’m not convinced it’s a super healthy way to live but it’s a condition I rely on in order to hear myself clearly. That’s old fashioned I guess? The idea of privacy or aloneness being required for thought? Or maybe the notion of privacy itself — keeping something entirely to yourself, that being enough, not telling anyone — is just over. Sometimes I think we care about privacy only when we’re asked if we do, or when we think it’s being taken away.
Gawker is dead now, Blackberries are done. The sensibility of the writer that would have made that post has probably shifted. My own self-indulgent post-grad anxieties about creative autonomy that probably drove my connection to the picture in the first place — they’ve thankfully faded. Back then I printed it out on my desktop Epson and it’s here on the wall in my studio now like it was in Brooklyn for so many years. I’m gone, too. I travel on a different subway in a smaller city where it feels much harder to disappear. The ghost hangs above my sink in a black metal frame I picked up at Michael’s, discolored by shitty inkjet banding and years of UV damage. I guess now it’s a souvenir? I wouldn’t say it haunts me, but it’s never quit working on me, never not made me uneasy.
YORGOS LANTHIMOS
A still from Dogtooth by Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009.
Afterimage by Camille Lévêque:
I’ve always been strongly influenced by cinema. I’m rarely interested in photography, but often in videos made by artists. Film stills remain on my mind in a way that’s slightly different from photographs.
Since the first time I watched it in March or April, I've kept a screenshot on my phone from the film Dogtooth (2009) by Yorgos Lanthimos, who represents the new wave in Greek cinema. He also made The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). His films are very visual, and he has what I would call the eye of a photographer. They’re also extremely dark, and Dogtooth leaves you feeling anguished, but it hides its darkness behind a lighter appearance and colourful scenes. The movie as a whole is beautiful, but each individual scene is well orchestrated: if you paused at any moment, you’d have a really interesting still image.
Dogtooth is about an isolated family. The parents keep their kids completely outside the world by creating a fantasy to keep them at home. I have one scene in particular on my mind – the one that I saved on my phone. It depicts a birthday. We don't know whose birthday it is, but of course, only the family is present. At one point, the daughters perform a dance to their brother’s guitar, and it’s terrifyingly awkward. The scene arrives near the end of the film, and a lot of tension has been building. It reaches a point of almost unbearable uneasiness and you know something terrible is bound to happen, and yet it only becomes increasingly absurd.
I’ve grown up with an education in cinema and watched all the classics, so many films made these days don't interest me at all. I’m interested in an experience rather than entertainment. My expectations when it comes to cinema are ridiculously high. When I see a movie, I want it to change my way of thinking, and almost change my life, and Dogtooth does this, in a way. I regularly look at that scene on my phone. I really love the grotesqueness, absurdity and darkness in the film. But it’s hard to watch – almost like witnessing an accident and being unable to look away.
ELAINE STOCKI
Elaine Stocki, Palomino
Afterimage by Curran Hatleberg:
Even though it’s been years since I first saw her work, many of Elaine Stocki’s photographs have stuck with me and claimed importance in my mind. This is probably because they evoke such a unique intensity of mood and feeling. They are haunting, and they just don’t look like any other photographs I see. Palomino is no exception. It is a wild, swirling chaos of color and gesture that gives off a burning heat. It almost scares me. Somehow Stocki figured out how to summon the dream state, or enter into a hallucination where the normal rules of reality don’t apply. I have no idea how she does it. One of the many joys of this picture for me is surrendering to its mystifying trance, letting its force pull you in.
Another part of the magic of Palomino – aside from the distinctive mood and feeling – is that it rejects easy interpretation. It’s impossible to pin down. It suggests clues as to what might be happening but reveals nothing. Even after studying the photograph for a long time there are no definitive answers. It’s a moment that is powerful precisely because of its lack of clarity. To me, it’s this open-ended quality that makes this image so amazing. Stocki invites the viewer to participate in their own creative interpretation and invention, allowing them to trust their imagination and let go. Palomino, like all my favorite artworks, is experienced more than understood.
A while back I read something the poet Mark Strand said in an interview that I saved in my phone. I keep returning to it now and then. Looking at Palomino, it seems appropriate here: “…we live with mystery, but we don’t like the feeling. I think we should get used to it. We feel we have to know what things mean, to be on top of this and that. I don’t think it’s human, you know, to be that competent at life.”
PATRICK KEILLER
Patrick Keiller, a still from LONDON, 1hr 40 min, 1994.
Afterimage by Helene Sommer:
I stumbled across the work of Patrick Keiller over 10 years ago, as I was scavenging the web for one thing or another. It was a clip from Keiller’s film London from 1994 and it immediately resonated with me on numerous levels. The first image is a shot of the iconic Tower Bridge in London. It’s a dreary and grey image. Quite unspectacular for a motif usually belonging to postcards and mugs. In general most shots in this film are seemingly both mundane and laconic, depicting ‘ordinary’ though very precise observations from everyday life in a city. There is no camera movement, only a static camera. No actors, no scenography. The bridge opens and a cruise ship slowly sails through.
In stark contrast to the imagery is the voice-over and soundtrack. The nameless narrator, who arrived on the cruise ship where he worked as a photographer, is meeting up with his ex-lover Robinson after 7 years. We never see either. The film is a wonderful mix of fiction and documentary. The soundtrack, in addition to the voice-over, has multiple references to the dramaturgical use of film music that contrasts the imagery. The narrative is complex and sometimes surreal in its multiple idiosyncratic references and juxtapositions - simultaneously very funny and deeply serious.
Together with the nameless narrator, the eccentric and visionary Robinson sets out to understand the ‘problem’ of London through a melancholic survey of the ruins of an urban ideal. A kind of psychogeographical travelogue investigating the multiple layers and textures of the city. Robinson solemnly drifts around London and reflects upon the historical undercurrents of the city’s many streets and buildings. He traces views that once inspired great painters, ponders Baudelaire while drifting through a Tesco supermarket, notes that in Lambeth there is a fence made out of beds from air-raid shelters, plans for a contemporary postcard series with the city’s homeless, tracks down flats of famous poets and traces the aftermath of an IRA bombing and the economic crisis in a post-Thatcher landscape.
Since watching London for the first time, I have seen most of what Patrick Keiller has produced; films, books and exhibitions. And I keep coming back for more. It’s the type of rare relationship that never gets old. London (1994) is the first part of a trilogy which includes Robinson in Space (1997) and Robinson in Ruins (2010), all highly recommended.
PHILIPPE HALSMAN
Philippe Halsman, French poet, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. NYC, USA. 1949. © DACS / Comité Cocteau, Paris 2018. © Philippe Halsman | Magnum Photos
Afterimage by Alix Marie:
Perhaps because it was summer when I was asked by Objektiv to write about an image my choice has been influenced by the past. I was in France and had spent a lot of time sorting through hundreds of family photographs; postc Marieards and memorabilia from various periods of my life. The two images that came to mind were Herbert Bayer, Humanly Impossible (Self-Portrait) from 1932 and Philippe Halsman’s photo of the French poet, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau from 1949. Bayer’s self portrait is an image I discovered as a teenager at the Bauhaus Museum on a school trip to Berlin. It has been in each of my bedrooms, in the form of a postcard or poster ever since. But then I felt that talking about it might actually kill the mystery of its power over me, so I’ll talk about Cocteau.
Herbert Bayer, Humanly Impossible (Self-Portrait), 1932.
Halsman’s portrait returned to me as he has always been one of my heroes. Still today, as I am preparing my next show at Musée Des Beaux Arts Le Locle, I find images from La Belle et la Bête popping up in my head constantly. My family comes from cinema, and films are more influential in my practice than anything else, perhaps even more specifically the favourite ones from my childhood. Cinema is historically and socially a big part of French culture, Paris being the only city in the world where you have one cinema screen per hundred inhabitants. The average of going to the cinema is twice a month, it is very much part of our habits, and it’s something I miss here in the UK.
I remember as a child looking for through an encyclopaedia on cinema and for Cocteau they just wrote: génie à multiples facettes. I thought that was the most wonderful definition of an artist. This is exactly what the portrait depicts: Cocteau’s ability to write (poetry, plays, screenplays), set design, draw, paint and direct films. In a sense I think we can also read this portrait of an artist in a contemporary sense, as artists we are asked to have an incredible amounts of skills in order to survive: make good work, know how to write about it, know how to speak about it publicly, do your own PR through social media, know how to sell your work, teach...
Thinking of my practice which often mixes mythology and autobiography, and my passion for mythological antique sculptures, I think perhaps it originally came from Cocteau. As when he turns Lee Miller into an armless goddess in Blood Of A Poet for example. The transformation, if I remember correctly, was achieved by covering her in flour and plaster which must have been extremely uncomfortable. It is another aspect of Cocteau’s films which fascinates me: his DIY special effects which in themselves carry so much poetry. I think for example of when Jean Marais walks through the mirror in Orpheus for example, it is just cut and paste, instead of a mirror it is water when he goes through. This is something I try and keep in my practice; it comes from the everyday and the ordinary as I try to make and fabricate everything I can myself and often repurpose domestic objects. The manipulations in my work are physical, I never manipulate an image digitally. In the end these two images share a lot in common, they use analogue tricks to achieve a poetic and political portrait or self portrait of the artist, and they carry a reference to antique sculpture, all aspects which have fed my practice since very early on.
ROBERT FRANK
Robert Frank. Words, Mabou, 1977. Vintage gelatin-silver print. 31,2 x 46,8 cm. Collection Fotostiftung Schweiz, Gift from the artist.
Afterimage by David Campany:
When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read the line of a poem twice.
In 1954-56, Robert Frank was on the road in the USA, making the photographs for what would become The Americans, perhaps the single most influential book by a photographer. Swiss by birth, Frank came to America in 1947. Politicians and the mainstream media were full of post-war optimism fueled by consumerism, television and Hollywood. All Frank could see was disappointment, alienation, and systemic racism. Published first in France in 1958, the images were accompanied by an anthology of quotes from various writers about the country. When the book appeared in America the following year, the quotes had been replaced by a foreword by Frank’s friend Jack Kerouac. The publisher was Grove Press, the primary outlet for the Beat generation poets.
Frank’s images were willfully subjective. They were also highly sophisticated redefinitions of the nation’s iconography. The stars and stripes flag recurs, but it is tattered or obliterating the faces of citizens. Movie stars look uneasy. Manual workers feel dejected. Passengers on a trolleybus arrange themselves by race. Motels and gas stations are bleak and forgotten. But through the metaphor and allegory there was also a romantic and angry longing for something better.
Modern America is a restart, an experiment. Its keenest observers in photography, film, painting, literature, theatre, and poetry have been monitors of that experiment. The Americans divided opinion but its reputation, particularly among other photographers, grew rapidly. For some, Frank had opened a rich new vein of image making. For others, his achievement could not be surpassed and new directions would have to be taken. Frank himself left photography almost immediately after The Americans, and took up filmmaking. In 1971, he moved from New York to Mabou, in remote Nova Scotia, Canada. He returned to still photography but not in pursuit of singular, iconic images. He made collages, mixing photographs and writing in different ways. As he pushed onwards, he looked back from time to time. The Americanswas becoming something of a counter-cultural monument. Museums and collectors were beginning to acquire prints. Frank grew reluctant to talk about The Americans, feeling that all he wanted to say had been said, and was in the pictures anyway. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the book has become the most discussed and analyzed of all photographic projects, the subject of endless essays and assessments.
In this photograph we see prints hanging on a washing line, on the coast of Mabou. There is an image of people on a boat. Frank shot it on the SS Mauretania, the day before he arrived in the USA. There is a photograph taken at a political rally in Chicago, 1956. It is one of the best-known images from The Americans. On the right, the word ‘Words’. Perhaps it was Frank’s sign of exhaustion with the endless talk about his work. Perhaps it was a substitute for an image, a placeholder for a language to come. Words have accompanied and haunted photographs from the beginning, and ours is a thoroughly a scripto-visual culture. Images conjure up words, and words conjure up images. Both are substitutes for realities they can never quite express, even with each other’s help. They are apart yet connected, like transatlantic friends.
The text is from Campany’s forthcoming book ‘On Photographs’, Thames & Hudson, with a few changes for our series.
LEA STUEDAHL
Afterimage by Lea Stuedahl:
A while back, my grandfather gave me all his negatives, pictures he had taken from when he was a teenager until he became a father. Through at these images I got to know him as more than my grandfather - whom I already love and admire. I got to know parts of him that has always been there, the core of his personality. In some ways it makes me understand him in a way that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. This is something I find compelling with photography; the way we might try to understand the photographer at the same time as we try to understand the photograph. There is so much identity attached to it. What we photograph says something about us as a person and how we see things. Looking at it that way, it is a really raw and vulnerable form of talking. So quiet, but yet brimming with words.
For me, this is the perfect picture for a daydreamer. I’m immediately taken away; the wind is playing with my hair, I can feel it. I want to be there, looking at this view. I long for the mountains and the smell of vacation in the south of Europe. I want this to be my own memory, and to always remember having seen this. The picture is taken by my grandfather, on his honeymoon with my grandmother. Their relationship didn’t last and I never got to experience the love they once shared. It’s a memory that’s not mine, from a time when I wasn’t. An everyday situation I’ll never know, and can only imagine. That’s the thing with photographs; it will never be one’s own reality, only a perception set in motion.
LINN SCHRÖDER
Linn Schröder, Selfportrait with twins and one breast, 2012 . (In cooperation with Elke Rüss).
Afterimage by Clara Bahlsen:
This image has been with me for a long time, it’s so special to me. I know the photographer, we have talked about photography, but we have never talked about this image.
I really relate to Linn Schröder’s picture, maybe everyone does, this borderline situation of life and death, how it talks about fear. It is such a poetic and dramatic image at the same time, and it’s bigger than words.
I feel that I can be part of the picture, it is kind of a community thing for me. Will one breast be enough? We see this male figure in front of the kid where there is no breast, and I feel it could be my hand. That I should take part in raising these children and maybe take care of the mother as well. You don’t see her face, it’s all about the bodies. It could be my body, or your body, we could all be in this situation. I can adapt to this very moment, which is strange as it is such a special and private one. To me the picture is not about one specific mother surviving an illness - it is us, all of us human beings, taking care of each other, sharing love and fear and life and death.
Maybe, since I have a child myself, this image became even more important to me. Death is closer now, my time will end before my son’s time. Since he came to this planet thoughts like these are more present to me, I can feel time running through me. I see this in the picture, they can’t die today, they have to get through this. You only see the faces of the children, no father, no mother, only the future. They depend on adults right now, but they will be fine later.
Some images become part of my own biography. I feel that I have been there, but of course I haven’t. But still, I’m unable to erase them from my mind. Unable to ever forget. They even physically become part of my body as the pictures are stored in my brain. That is such a powerful act.
WILL OLDHAM
Spiderland cover photo, Will Oldham.
Afterimage by Marius Eriksen:
The image on the front cover of Slint’s seminal album Spiderland, taken by Will Oldham, the musician behind the various monikers Palace Music, Palace Brothers and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, is an image that entered my life at sixteen. Browsing through CD’s in a record store, the image of four heads bobbing in a quarry gave me a strange mix of contradictory feelings, feelings of emptiness and warmth. The photograph seemed so familiar, like I had experienced that exact moment myself. It felt like I was standing in an alternate universe looking at a moment that I had been part of in some strange way. I’ve tried several times to recreate this image in the many creeks and rivers of my hometown without any success. I never managed to create the same type of eerie feeling. I guess some moments just aren’t easily reproduced, or maybe some moments aren’t meant to be reproduced.
Looking at the four persons half submerged in the water with their faces half-smiling, it felt like they were staring right through me, like there was some dark Lovecraftian force lurking in front of them and that it was hanging over me. Could their gaze be an omen? An omen that my salad days were drawing to a close? That the future was going to be lined with darkness and destitution? I had no idea what to make of it, but my mind was racing just looking at that cover. It felt like it took some time before my mind managed climb out of the existential void this image hurled me into and my focus started to shift. Looking at that image again, their gaze wasn’t longer an unsettling gaze, it offered consolation. Their smirking faces provided a sort of stoic consolation, a promise that no matter what lies ahead, the bottom line would be that things would nonetheless turn out to be OK.
MIKE BRODIE
From Mike Brodie’s book A Period of Juvenile Prosperity
Afterimage by Scott Hobbes Bourne:
A foreboding, the crossroads of youth, a fork in the void. A young mother with legs spread wide only moments away from forcing a child into the world. To focus on the center of this image and let your imagination run out, is to see the unopened door to the womb. A tender, sparse pubis ripe for the picking. A family tree putting on another ring, each and every one of her roots a dead-end road. The unknown abyss staring back at an unassuming youth, believing all the while there were dreams out there.
The photographer finds himself at a particular latitude and longitude where rules and logic no longer apply and harsh reality sets in. The scene before him is one that cannot be created, it must be recognized and then captured in order for its power to become a reality. Nailed to the pages of Mike Brodie’s book: A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, this image takes on an importance which is historic. All this space, and no-where to go. How many lost youths have traveled these tracks, or crossed this overpass and failed to recognize that jagged horizon fading into a soft white, each and every one of us on a collision course with death. No matter which way you take, you’ll arrive at the same place. A hypnotic, heavenly light at the end of a long tunnel, always and forever, just out of reach. The vast American nightmare and nowhere to sleep! Looking at this photograph I feel my entire youth summed up in one seductive and chilling image that cannot be altered by time. The roads are impassable, and no matter how many have traveled them, they’ve left no tracks, there is no map, and they never, ever, came back. You are alone, and this photograph lets you know it. You can either embrace that, or hurl yourself off the bridge onto the tracks. This is quite possibly one of the most incredible landscapes ever collected by an American photographer because it shows us that.
If a book has a binding that holds it together, it’s this single photo that holds all the other images in place, gives them potency, and allows them to make their mark. You cannot get here without being stranded. This is what it means to be young and without a country no matter what has been preached in the schools and churches that dot the landscape like a false constellation, you are looking at god and getting no direction. Not a star in the sky you can trust, not a compass to make sense of the landscapes, you are on your own out here. Mike Brodie has been there, done that, and miraculously made it from this impasse without landing on the tracks or the bill of a speeding train. He has found that place where one shot on fallen snow is more powerful than all the guns in the world. This is what it means to photograph.
TORIL JOHANNESSEN
Photo from Arne Nævra.
Afterimage by Toril Johannessen: It’s a tough question. I automatically start thinking about all the photographs that has stayed with me from when I was studying photography. I looked at images in a different way then, often in books, and would get back to the same images again and again.
But if I have to choose one image, and one that has been with me for a while, it’s the image of the polar bear on the remnant of an iceberg in Svalbard by Arne Nævra from 2005. It’s been widely debated and shown in different contexts, which is one of the things that make the image interesting to me. The photograph was criticized by the so-called Klimarealistene for being manipulated, to support their claims that climate change is not caused by human factors – as if a faked photo would prove that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. In any case, the picture isn’t manipulated, but the false claim about fakery perhaps says something about our relationship with the truth of photographs.
I found the photograph recently again on a postcard in Tromsø with the text ‘Norway’ written on it. There, amidst picturesque motifs of the Northern Lights, mountains and fjords, the picture was used as a sort of advertisement for Norway and spectacular nature. It’s completely absurd. It’s such a symbolic image, but as a postcard it makes me think of Norway as an oil nation, a force that contribute to climate change. Turning the image into an “advertisement”, the postcard comes across as an emblem of Norwegian double standards.
The motivation of the photographer is clear: he’s a nature conservationist, but the image takes new directions outside his control, which makes it even more fascinating.
PETER HUJAR
Peter Hujar, Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, 1973.© 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
Afterimage by Preben Holst:
I was intrigued by the picture before I knew about Peter Hujar and his work. It really hit me when I saw it years ago, and it remains on my mind today. Knowing Candy Darling’s story makes the portrait even stronger. Hujar’s photograph says a lot about her, about him as photographer, and also about the time they lived in. They were part of a creative group of people around Andy Warhol’s Factory in a time when everyone broke old conventions and created their own rules with an attitude that doesn’t really exist anymore. You won’t find these kind of people today, when everything, from buildings to personalities, are gentrified.
I can see that he has portrayed her in a very respectful fashion. He is in no way intrusive; there exists a mutual respect between them. She had actually asked him to portray her, and to me the title “turns the volume up” for the photograph. She was only twenty-nine at the time. She was a transgender woman dying of lymphatic cancer, probably caused by her hormonal treatment.
She had grown up knowing she was different. Her dream was to become a very famous blonde actress. Kim Novak was the goal. When she moved to Manhattan, it didn’t take her long to join the underground art scene. Warhol said she should be in the movies, and she appeared in several of his films, though she never got the big commercial break she dreamed about. (She did, however, featured in a play by Tennessee Williams.) At some point Warhol tired of her, as he did with many people, and she struggled after that. You can see so much of this history in Hujar’s picture—the Factory, the broader cultural environment, and the physical and emotional changes she underwent.
The portrait is personal and dignified. Later, Hujar said that in the image Darling had played all the great death scenes featuring women, that it was her final performance. She knew it was the end of her life. She was extremely tired and sick when the portrait was taken, but fought to rise to this last role.
Antony and the Johnsons later used Hujar’s picture on the cover of the 2005 album I Am a Bird Now, extending the portrait’s reach into the wider culture. Their music and Darling’s history are both about outsiders and exclusion, about all the things Darling lived through.
A grace note: Lou Reed wrote about Candy Darling in his songs and he also invited Antony and the Johnsons to be his warm-up band. A lovely coincidence.
DAVID GOLDBLATT
David Goldblatt, Child with a replica of a Zulu hut at the Voortrekker Monument, on the Day of the Covenant, Pretoria (3_9248), Dec 1963, Courtesy Goodman Gallery.
Afterimage by Kobie Nel:
Keep looking… polka dots and pearls
A woman with three arms? She is dressed fashionably and precise.
Her daughter, who is just as fashionable, is about to enter the darkness of a straw hut.
I sense that ribbon in her hair won’t be in place much longer.
Then there is this brutalist monstrosity in the background overlooking it all.
Is she staring at the monstrosity, calling her daughter back to safety, or conscious of her appearance in the presence of a photographer?
The child has turned her back on her mother, the mother has turned her back on the photographer and the photographer’s back is turned on me, the beholder.
We are all faceless.
I have an urge to keep looking. What is unfolding in front of me?
The viewpoint is slightly elevated and settles my gaze on the tower overlooking it all.
Is it a tower? With a sudden ‘eureka' moment of discovery, I do know what is going on here.
As a child, I visited this place many times with my parents during summer vacation road trips. It is a familiar landmark in South Africa: The Voortrekker Monument, its shape deeply rooted in my heritage. The monument is the symbol of the struggle of the Voortrekkers, my ancestors, who left the Cape Colony on The Great Trek. The Great Trek was a migration of Dutch-speaking settlers who travelled by wagon trains from the Cape Colony into the interior of modern South Africa, seeking to live beyond the Cape’s British colonial administration. The idea was to build a monument in honour of God. Today, you can find its image on many old cookie tins in secondhand markets, or on display in your grandmother’s kitchen ‘top shelf’ cookie tin collection. Often, they’re next to the British royal wedding tins, which contradicts the whole Afrikaner/British relationship. But that’s another story.
This photograph was taken by South African photographer, David Goldblatt, who passed away last year. I am very familiar with his work, but this photograph was unknown to me until I first encountered it, to my surprise, in an email. I met Goldblatt when I was 19, eager and ambitious to pursue documentary photography as my career and curious about this man photographing Afrikaners, who refused to let the work be used in a journalistic context. Goldblatt documented the tumultuous period in South African history that was still going on until just weeks before his death. But he also photographed white South Africa, taking the same dispassionate look at white nationalists, the comfortably wealthy, and the poor and disenfranchised he found among them.
Before he died, Goldblatt bequeathed his archive of negatives to Yale University. It was a controversial move; he had previously promised the trove to the University of Cape Town, but withdrew his collection after student protestors began burning campus artworks that they deemed to be ‘colonial symbols’.
I have not lived in South Africa for ten years and the thought of his work – including this photograph – being destroyed terrifies me. What the image shows is a nuance. It does not show the horrors of that period, but a woman who could have easily been my grandmother with my mother, both of whom possibly did attend this memorial event that took place once a year. The day commemorated the vow taken by the Voortrekkers before the Battle of Blood River, that if God gave them victory over the Zulus, they would always keep this as a day of thanksgiving. The Afrikaner dress code for these events was strictly formal; for women, pantyhose was a must.
The monochrome tones of the image create immense depth and compassion, so much so that I want to reach in and touch the woman’s shoulder, feeling the texture of her jumper.
In itself, the image is ordinary – a bit strange at first glance. Like many of Goldblatt’s photographs, it isn’t dramatic, the subjects unknown. Perhaps the little girl in the image is someone else’s daughter, just a little girl trying to peek inside the straw huts on display. But it shows the casual exterior of a society separated by apartheid, while at the same time capturing the uneasiness that pulsed through my childhood when growing up in South Africa, as well as through my parents' childhood. It recalls things I saw but did not see. And it drags up the old questions that lurk beneath my memories – how could such ordinariness take place while countless horrors were happening off camera?
Today, I am grateful to Goldblatt for this image, which helps me understand my own heritage, as well as what one chooses in order to represent our time. As Susan Sontag wrote in her essay ‘On Photography’, ‘The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.”