Iuzza

How do you re-narrate the totality of someone’s life, whether your own or someone else’s? It would seem that providing as much detail as possible will help an audience understand the person in question. But as Édouard Levé demonstrated in his book Autoportrait, the accumulation of the most precise and minute statements only produces an incredibly compelling and magical piece of art, without bringing a reader any closer to the lived reality of the author’s life.

Photographs add a complication to the already fraught task of narration, given how mute they are. It’s not the trite fact that they only show surfaces; instead, it’s their completely fragmented nature that makes them such cumbersome entities to work with when biography is the intended end result.

Photographs are puzzle pieces that typically do not connect with each other. The best you can hope for when working with them is the creation of a mosaic.

There is much to be said for such mosaics, though, especially in light of the ultimate futility of attempting to re-narrate someone’s life: if, as is obvious, a life cannot be re-narrated truthfully, whether on an atomic Levé level or a much larger one, the deliberate exclusion of a life’s aspects (“facts”) can serve to create the larger whole. And words — written text — can fill the role that plaster plays in a physical mosaic.

Francesca Todde‘s Iuzza relies on photographs and text to re-narrate aspects of the Italian actress and writer Goliarda Sapienza‘s life. There are seven chapters, each with its own particular focus. The bulk of the text comes at the end of the book, even as it refers to some of the visual elements presented earlier.

A disclaimer: I was not familiar with Sapienza. While I know a few things about Italy, I ended up feeling that I probably do not know enough about either the actress/writer or the country to be able to fully understand the book. I do think that the book probably relies on an audience that has more knowledge about its topic than I am able to bring to the table. You will want to keep in mind.

This is not to say that I did not enjoy spending time with the book. I did. As is the case for all of the books made by Départ Pour l’Image, a relatively new publisher based in Italy, the book has been produced with a lot of attention to detail, and it features wonderful photography.

Given my relative ignorance of the main topic, I probably picked up a few notes more than others. In particular, there is a pervasive feeling of sadness throughout the book, a feeling of melancholia. At any given moment, I thought, it could tip into something much more severe.

I have been to Italy numerous times. As much as I enjoy the country — how could one not when surrounded by so much culture and a real appreciation for good food and drink? — the inevitable presence of the country’s past always had me on edge. You might imagine the country being a gigantic theme park, and there certainly are areas that feel like that. But historical sites and buildings are so common that outside of the very touristy areas, they still cast their shadows.

Maybe there is something to be said for the stereotype that if you are born in Germany, some of the ideas of Romanticism will inevitably become ingrained in your psyche: the idea that decay and beauty combine in a fashion that might reveal a dark side any time soon. Maybe that is what I connected with on my trips to Italy and when looking at this book.

Some of the text in the back of the book informs me that Sapienza did indeed have periods where her mental health deteriorated, with severe depression playing a role. This is not sadness, and it is not melancholia. It’s something else entirely.

Thus with this book, I am bringing certain aspects to the table — a history of depression and that German Romanticism I mentioned above. What I’m connecting with is something that the work attempts to communicate. I can see it in the pictures, and the words are clear as well.

I suppose all of the above also must acknowledge the crucial fact that the final part of a biography — anyone’s, whether Levé’s or Sapienza’s — is always formed in a reader’s/viewer’s head: you respond to what you can and want to respond to. That’s the beauty of it all.

As I said, only a person who is more immersed in the world presented in the book can probably more fully appreciate and enjoy it. But that’s OK. In the end, with all pieces of art we’re limited in what we have available when facing them. The purpose of art cannot be to serve those fully in the know. Instead, art needs to reach out to those who are not.

That is what Iuzza does.

IUZZA. Goliarda Sapienza; photographs by Francesca Todde; texts by Luca Reffo; 280 pages; Départ Pour l’Image; 2024

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Sandwiched between two perpetually murderous nations (Germany and russia), Poland has had its fair share of tragedy over the course of its history. It is situated at the western edge of the region termed Bloodlands by historian Timothy Snyder who described the reign of destruction inflicted by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. At various points in time, Poland ceased to exist as a state, having been parceled up and incorporated into neighboring empires. No surprise then that national identity and history — mind you, the writing of it — play an enormous role in Poland.

This became especially clear during the recent reign of the neofascist PiS party that sought to re-define history (as all neofascist parties do) to further the country’s glory, elevating any number of odious characters (ditto) and demonizing its neighbours, which, granted, had brought much destruction to Polish lands. Of course, given how bad it had been that destruction did not need any PiS efforts to talk it up. And PiS’ embrace of some of the more odious aspects of Polish history also did not reflect well on the country.

But neofascism isn’t interested in historical facts or truth: it’s interested in a glorified past that aligns with its ideology, and it’s interested in constantly whipping up voters’ resentment. Resentment drives the neofascist project, in particular the ideas that a) people voting for neofascist parties somehow are overlooked, ignored, and/or forgotten while others reap the benefits (cue the inevitable racism and antisemitism) and b) the country needs to go back to a glorious past that has been betrayed by “elites” in power.

Even without the neofascist project history is constantly being re-written and adjusted. This is not just because there might be the occasional new discovery, whether archeological or otherwise. But people’s thinking also evolves. A few hours ago, I visited a village just to the north of where I am writing these words. In one of the historical houses, one of the volunteers bombarded me with details about the various rooms none of which I retained, simply because I was so struck by her use of “we” and “the English” — as if somehow this was still the 18th Century.

In a different building, a museum, you could easily discover updates to the various displays. A number of stone plaques, created to memorialize people (colonial settlers) who had lived there, had been covered up with cloth ones: the language had been changed in order to reflect today’s sensibilities. A corner now contained word of the role of slavery in the village, and various items had been removed from vitrines and replaced with signs that they were now being looked at to determine whether it was culturally sensitive to still display them.

History, in effect, does not exist. History is always an exercise in ideology, however benign one might imagine that ideology might be. It is the telling of history that reflects what a country believes about itself, and for me, that is one of the most interesting aspects of history (because, let’s face it, the re-telling of most historical facts — usually endless names of rulers — is mostly very tedious).

By construction, there is a certain cartoonishness to historical reenactments. Everybody knows that it’s costumes, and everybody knows that those wearing them typically live much more comfortable lives than the ones they pretend to exhibit during the shows. Furthermore, the selectiveness of their historical narration is amplified through the spectacle itself, which, of course, has to be entertaining for spectators.

With all of the above in mind, historical reenactments really are not about the past. They’re about the present: they reflect what people want to believe in. And that’s why they can be so interesting. Over the years, I have seen a number of photography projects about such reenactments. The problem with such projects is that it’s so easy to get the pictures, but it’s so hard to make them about more than the costumes. It’s the costumes, after all, and possibly the fake blood that will get all of the attention.

Michał Sita‘s History of Poland Vol. 2 differs from such project for two reasons: first, there is added text, words spoken by some of the reenactors. Second, and crucially, Sita himself was one of them, wearing a camera around his neck during the proceedings (the camera took a photograph every second, and while it was not visible for spectators, the other reenactors were aware of it). There also are a few other photographs that look as if they were taken with a different camera.

The show in question is called The Eagle and the Cross, and it’s happening in Murowana Goślina, a small town in western Poland, just north of Poznań (which, if you don’t know, sits about in the middle between Berlin and Warsaw). The show feature six separate chapters, starting somewhere in the Middle Ages and ending with a Nazi soldier sending prisoners to Auschwitz (the book explains some of the events and characters).

I was particularly struck by one of the text sections in which a volunteer actor imagined how one of the thousands of Polish officers murdered by Soviet soldiers in Katyn might have faced his death. It is clear that the actor does not have the unnamed officer in mind. There might not have been a specific officer anyway, a person with a family. No, it’s an unknown officer, one whose death will later play a role when both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union will accuse each other of the massacre.

And of course, the death also plays a role in the play: yet another, very different role. “Pride,” the actor imagines, “is not a smile, but rather a grimace showing that he is no longer afraid and is ready for what is about to happen.” “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” the Roman poet Horace had already written two millennia earlier: “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.” But it’s not just sweet and proper, you also have to go about it with pride so that your death might serve those who survive or live later.

There is something unsettling about a book that lays out so clearly how the past is made to serve contemporary purposes. But it’s an important book, especially given the fact how the past has become weaponized by the neofascists — in Poland as much as in the US, Germany, Hungary, Italy, russia (the movement’s center), and elsewhere. Even as it’s important for us to understand the past, it’s equally or possibly even more important for us to understand to what end we want to understand it.

History of Poland Vol. 2; photographs and text by Michał Sita; 96 pages; Sun Archive Books; 2024

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It’s probably fair to say that the one place that has most severely been photographically misrepresented is the continent of Africa. There are many contributing factors, most notably, of course, colonialism. The European colonial project relied on the camera for its purposes, defining to a large extent how Africa was to be seen. But it doesn’t stop there.

Western photojournalism played and still plays a major role in the continued misrepresentation of Africa. It doesn’t matter at all whether photojournalists went or go to Africa with the best of intentions (as they typically do); what matters is that many of them appear to be oblivious of the issue at hand.

One of the key approaches to rectifying the situation entails looking at the work of local photographers. How have photographers born and working in Africa portrayed the people in the various countries they were and/or are living in?

In photoland, this approach is typically broadly described as centering on a person’s gaze. It’s likely that you will be familiar with the term “the male gaze”. But you need to be careful with that term, because the male gaze is not identical with a man being the photographer. What it means instead is that the world is portrayed in such a fashion that the visual representation conforms to how an assertive heterosexual man views it. As is very obvious from the world of fashion photography, women photographers can easily re-produce the male gaze.

In much the same fashion, to discover the African gaze you need to go deeper as well. Photographers from Africa can easily produce what you might want to think of as a neocolonial view of Africa (the most obvious example is provided by some of Pieter Hugo’s work).

The following might be tad naive, but it still might serve as a good initial approach to how to distinguish the neocolonial view from a real African gaze. The former is produced for outsiders (in Hugo’s case, a Western art market interested in pictures that look good over wealthy collectors’ couches). The latter is produced for a local audience (even if it could eventually reach an audience outside of Africa).

Amy Sall‘s new book The African Gaze provides a most welcome overview of some of the richness produced by photographers and filmmakers from Africa.

I should note that in the following, I will focus on the first half of the book, photography. This is because I know next to nothing about film making in general. I don’t mean to imply that film making is not interesting. It might well be. I simply don’t watch many movies. As a consequence, there’s nothing of any value that I could say about them. I am in no position to assess the second half of the book in any kind of critical capacity.

In a nutshell, The African Gaze contains introductions to 25 photographers and 25 filmmakers. In the photography case, the artists hail from Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Niger, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, and Uganda (several countries are represented by more than one photographer).

Individual biographies might be more complex. For example, Augustt Azaglo Cornélius Yawo was born in Togo. He spent his childhood and formative years there and in Ghana. He then became a prominent photographer in Côte d’Ivoire after he settled in that country at age 31.

For sure, some of the names will be more familiar to a Western audience than others. Malick Sidibé’s work is relatively well known in the West (not necessarily compared with Western artists but certainly when compared with photographers from Africa), as is Ernest Cole’s, Samuel Fosso’s, or James Barnor’s.

One of the most interesting aspects of looking through the book — besides the discover of any number of incredible artists — is understanding the many shared sensibilities between the photographers, since it connects the known names with the lesser known ones and their background.

The business of the photography studio provides the most prominent backdrop of vast parts of the work showcased in The African Gaze. The photographs in question were commissioned by people coming to the studios who wanted to have a visual keepsake — much like how in other parts of the world photo studios played the same role.

The role of photography studios is possibly underappreciated in photoland for any number of reasons. Where photo studio artists have become known, it’s mostly because of the perceived exoticism of their work — and this is not necessarily only the West looking at the rest of the world. Reading about the work of, for example, Mike Disfarmer, I usually can’t help but think that it’s the perceived exoticism of those in the photographs that provides most of its appeal.

Of course, there also is the fact that given its very traditional and conservative leanings, photoland demands that photographers be artists, and an artist is supposed to be independent of the whims of the people paying for their work (however laughable an idea this is once you look at how the art market works). A true photolandian portraitist must insist on their own artistic genius over what their sitters want. Throw in some classism, and thus the whole rich genre of the photo studio is mostly relegated to the dustbin.

If as a viewer, you’re able to free yourself from how photoland views photography studio work, The African Gaze has much to offer. Time and again, the photographers were able to produce the most amazing work, even as they often eschewed what elsewhere were considered photo-studio conventions.

In maybe the most exciting such example, Oumar Ly’s assistant spread his arms while standing behind a young woman holding her young child, creating a backdrop with the fabric of his garment. In Ly’s framing, the assistant’s head and left hand remain visible, as does part of the background. The resulting photograph is a portrait of a woman and her child. But it also is a portrait of a life situation — the complete opposite of the family propaganda that was so commonly produced in the West.

This is the main point of The African Gaze: how you look at someone (and with what ideas in mind) determines what you will see. A whole continent narrowly defined using racist ideas can only emerge on its own terms if it is allowed to do that, if, in other words, it is encountered on its own terms.

The photographers in the book — in combination with those who commissioned their work — set those terms, terms that not only enrich our understanding of Africa but also challenge some of the ideas we have adopted for the depictions of ourselves.

Recommended.

The African Gaze; images by various artists; essays/texts by Amy Sall, Mamadou Diouf, Yasmina Price, Zoé Samudzi; 288 pages; Thames & Hudson; 2024

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In a conversation I had with a photographer a little while ago, she mentioned how terrible most of her teachers had been at the art school she had gone to. However, there had been one exception, a teacher whose generosity and dedication towards his students had known no bounds: Allan Sekula.

Anyone who went to an art school might share similar experiences. I personally never went to an art school. But for a while, I had the privilege to teach at some. In that capacity, I taught alongside a relatively large grouping of other teachers.

Seeing other teachers at work isn’t comparable to interacting with them as a student. But it was straightforward to notice which teachers were generous and genuinely invested in their students’ best interests — and which ones were not. In fact, the best teachers — or what I imagine the people possibly perceived as the best teachers by the students — were those who inspired me and who had me jealous of what they had to offer.

Being able to teach alongside Barbara Bosworth or John Priola or Lisa Kereszi or Steve Smith or Doug DuBois or Mary Frey — to mention just a few names (I’m sure to for forget some, but completeness really can’t be the point here) — was an experience that I will carry with me forever. I’m still making my way through the many lessons they imparted on their students, a much delayed process that is not always easy.

What I realized watching these brilliant teachers teach is that in their own ways, they were giving a part of themselves that they then would not have for themselves. Teaching can be cruel that way — if you approach it with the greedy, selfish mind of an artist.

A brief aside: for someone to make art, they will have to be greedy and selfish while they do it (but hopefully not when engaging with other people). Through that greed and selfishness you get thrown back to your own innermost core. And it is only from there, when you’re as true to yourself as you possibly can be, that you can — and will — make art that has the potential to touch other people.

Teaching is only cruel if as an artist you don’t understand that it actually is a two-way street. If you go about teaching as a job that entails imparting your wisdom on young people who paid you for that, you’ll not only be a bad teacher. You also will not learn anything yourself. And what’s the point of teaching if you don’t use the opportunity to grow yourself?

I’m not at all surprised to see that Alec Soth has now made a book about teaching art. Even as our approaches to teaching were very different — for example, Soth has a sense of humour, whereas I don’t; Soth doesn’t take everything always seriously, whereas I take everything much too seriously all the time; Soth thrives in group settings, whereas I’m often wracked by social anxiety, etc. — it was abundantly obvious how much generosity and curiosity he brought (and I must assume still brings) to teaching.

And so there now is Advice for Young Artists, a book photographed at a number of undergraduate art departments in the United States. I don’t think the book was made for people like me. I see it as aimed at these young people who for some reason or another decided that they wanted to go to an art school (this group includes one of my nieces).

I don’t know whether there ever was a good time to go to an art school. As far as I understand it, studying art has always been seen as a futile endeavour, as something that would put you on a difficult track as far as later career opportunities were concerned.

Of late, US academia has become ever more corporatized. Tuition rates have exploded, saddling young people with a shameful and absolutely disgusting amount of debt. Meanwhile, teaching opportunities have become rarer and rarer.

Now it’s not even your parents who might tell you that going to an art school might be a bad career choice. It’s also the larger public sphere that continues to devalue the humanities, because the jobs are where bombs are being made or algorithms are being coded or new financial products are being packaged.

All of that makes going to an art school a bold act. It’s the pursuit of something seen as useless by the larger public sphere. For that fact alone I love the idea of doing it, and I have endless respect and admiration for those who do it. Pursue the useless! Or rather: pursue what other people might see as useless, and then really show them! But I’m getting carried away. After all, it’s not my advice anyone is interested in. For all the right reasons, it’s Soth’s.

If people might be suspecting a lot of heavy text, they might come away disappointed from the book. That disappointment is solely on them — and not on the photographer. Because one of the biggest lessons the work has to offer lies written in the faces of the young students who found themselves on the other side of the camera. Their earnest and so obviously heartfelt pursuit of art making — where else in this world do we get to see so much genuine earnestness and heartfelt pursuit?

What do we see when we look at the larger public sphere? A sphere filled with fascist shysters, no-nothing venture capitalists, and soulless politicians who have to focus group their lunch order lest they eat the wrong thing. What are we seeing in their faces?

I shouldn’t be comparing Soth’s portraits with my own for reasons that are too obvious to mention them here. Still, I will note that the students in front of Soth’s camera exude that sense of genuine earnestness and heartfelt pursuit I spoke of above (whereas the ones in front of my camera typically look stressed or worried — which, granted, works well for the themes in my work).

In the end, of course, what we see in the portraits is the person behind the camera. In other words, the photographs in Advice betray their maker’s dedication to teaching and the full-on earnestness and dedication to a greater good. And that’s a really good thing.

Advice for Young Artists; photographs by Alec Soth; 72 pages; MACK; 2024

If you want to destroy a democracy, you need to do two things. First, you need to destroy the idea of a greater good. Over the course of the past roughly 45 years, neoliberal capitalism has done that job. Margaret Thatcher famously said the following: “who is society? There is no such thing!” If there is no society, no greater good, if, in other words, only the individual matters, then you can pursue policies that disassemble what holds societies together (public infrastructure, the social safety net etc.).

Depriving people of their means of survival then is not an attack on every single person (in other words, on society itself). Instead, it’s merely an attack on some people who, and this is usually implied but occasionally said, for some reason had it coming (the poor, foreigners, asylum seekers, women, etc.).

Second, you need to establish doubt as one of the drivers of public discourse. Arguing for truth (one of those larger goods) is tedious, and it takes too much time. Instead, you only need to instill in people that their own personal doubt, whatever it might be based on, is valid and that everything, however much it might be based on facts or reality, should be subjected to doubt.

In a nutshell, this idea pours gasoline onto the small fires in the reptilian parts of people’s brains: if it is acceptable that everything can be doubted, there will be strife. And strife serves the purposes of those who want to destroy democracy and replace it with something else (whether they’re a former TV personality with a severe psychiatric disorder or a street thug whose education was provided by the KGB).

Doubt, of course, has long played a role in the lives of human beings. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with doubt per se — quite on the contrary: the most dangerous people usually are those who are incapable of doubting themselves.

We all experience doubt throughout our life times. On a larger scale, we might question our life choices (“maybe I should have pursued a different career?”). On a daily basis, the sheer infinity of choices we face each come with a bit of doubt (“should I have bought eggs from a different company?”).

In other words, doubt is part of the essence of being human being. Doubt comes with — or creates — uncertainty.

It’s so interesting that even as doubt is essential to being human, if there’s anything we hate it’s uncertainty. For example, when physicists developed quantum theory, one of its most bewildering aspects was what became known as the uncertainty principle. The cat in the unopened box, to use the image widely known outside of the world of physics, should be thought of as simultaneously alive and dead. How can this be when in our daily lives we only know cats that are alive or dead — but not both?

Anna Püschel‘s Encyclopedia of the Uncertain attempts to provide an answer, even though it will largely depend on the reader her or himself to determine whether that’s the case. Some readers might embrace the uncertainty; others might discover the solution for their personal conundrum.

The book compiles a large number of text fragments with images and illustrations (the list of references runs all the way up to 517). Interspersed in between are excerpts from the artist’s own writing.

This is an unusual book for a publisher that has so far focused on a very specific style of photobook, one in which text typically plays a large role. There is a consistent didacticism to their back catalogue that is entirely at odds with what this Encyclopedia provides.

Even though the book purports to follow the conventions of encyclopedic books, it’s probably closer in spirit to a pre-scientific Wunderkammer approach. And how could it not be that? How could there be certainty in a book focusing on uncertainty?

Encyclopedia of the Uncertain is not the type of book that you would read like a novel. Or at least I am unable to do it (there are people, I was told, who do read encyclopedias). Instead, you’re much better off nibbling here and there, whether in the order in which the material is presented or not (I don’t think this matters).

Opening the book in a random spot might deliver something genuinely interesting, or it might not, much like reading it from the beginning (something I initially attempted to do) delivers the same experience.

What I especially appreciate about the book is that it rejects the idea of making ultimate sense, the idea of coming to a specific conclusion. Too often when artists attempt to engage in what they think is scientific work, the end results are simultaneously scientifically clumsy (if even that) and artistically needlessly didactic.

Of course, didacticism has its place — but not in the arts, the domain of the useless, the poorly defined and uncertain, the domain of love and doubt.

“As individuals in uncertain times,” the text accompanying the book says, “we not only have the right but also the duty to look for truth, and not blindly follow the loudest voices that (un)knowingly propagate falsities.” You get to hear or read that a lot these days: it’s the idea that you can fact check away fascism. But you can’t — unless you understand the idea of truth better.

In an episode of Seinfeld, George tells Jerry: “Jerry, just remember. It’s a not lie if you believe it.” To treat utterances by, say, Donald Trump as lies is pointless, given that there is no shared understanding of the idea of truth. I’m convinced that Trump actually believes all the things he’s saying, even if he changes his mind all the time. He’s not a liar: ordinary liars understand and accept the idea of an agreed-upon truth.

That’s why Trump’s world and Vladimir Putin’s converge. Putin emerged from the Soviet Union’s KGB. Under the Communist system, truth was defined by facts or reality. Truth was defined by the party and its ideologues. And that truth could radically change from one day to the next (as it occasionally did). People were sent to the gulag or shot in KGB prisons because what had been true the day before now was not any longer.

I think the only way to re-center the truth is to first re-center something else: the greater, universal good. You will need a greater good, because if there is no greater good there will be nothing that provides the solid ground truth can stand on. And that greater good will have to be unconditional and apply to everyone.

The one thing that most people still don’t understand is that the sciences work with doubt all the time. They acknowledge uncertainty, and they incorporate it into their work. Given that we live in a quantum world, it would be scientifically unsound not to do so.

While absolute scientific certainty can never be had, it’s doubt and uncertainty that actually drive scientific progress: what if there were a better way? What if we attempted to be a little bit more precise? What if in that tiny little imprecision lies a way to improve our understanding of what’s going on?

As individuals in uncertain times, we thus have to understand that uncertainty is not the — or a — problem. Doubt and the resulting uncertainty are what make us human. Doubt creates the most beautiful art.

Our main problem is our lack of a will to work towards the greater, universal good. After all, there is such a thing as a society, and it is rather beautiful, however imperiled it might be right now.

Encyclopedia of Doubt; text fragments, images, and illustrations compiled by Anna Püschel; 768 pages; The Eriskay Connection; 2024

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