As announced in its title, the anniversary exhibition is a celebration. A celebration and a tribute, as much to the institution as to the visual diversity of photography itself. The principle, devised by Lesley A. Martin, an editor of the foundation, is a kind of aesthetic conversation.
Martin asked eight contemporary photographers with whom she had previously collaborated—Rinko Kawauchi, Vik Muniz, Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, Martin Parr, Doug Rickard, Vivane Sassenm Alec Soth, Penelope Umbrico and James Welling—to produce an original series inspired by a work of their choice from the Aperture catalogue.
The exercise shows how each photographer conceives of the medium, revealing influences which are sometimes obvious, sometimes unconventional, making the whole a fertile mixture of the personal and the pedagogical. Doug Rickard chose, unsurprisingly, to respond to Stephen Shore’s formalism by re-using an existing photographic document, the postcard. It’s a variation on his previous work using images taken from Google Earth, which he appropriated in order to make his approach both social and theoretical. Aperture recently published a compilation of his research on this topic, and some of the pieces are being exhibited at the Yossi Milo gallery, organized in such a way as to offer an immersive experience of this virtual exploration. Through editing, colorization and reforming, he makes different use of the initial object and points to the urban and societal structures of the 1950s and 60s to question the structures of our own time.
As with most of the contributions, the commission is the subject of a highly limited-edition book (five to ten copies) whose projects will go to supporting the Foundation. In Penelope Umbrico’s response to Martin’s prompt, the photographer compiled all of the existing photo apps and used them at random to capture and reproduce various images of mountains which have appeared in Aperture books throughout its history. The work is as much a reflection on landscapes as on the element of chance inherent in the photographic act, a factor compounded by the relative precision of a device like the iPhone, resulting in a gallery of various-format photographs of often unrecognizable mountains, inverted by a sudden camera movement, and representing the full range of color filters. The series is in some ways an anachronistic history of photography and its equipment.
Another response: Edward Weston’s iconic “The White Iris” was carefully reconstructed by Vik Muniz using small fragments of pages cut out from The Daybooks of Edward Weston, Volume 1, where the image is reproduced.
The master of sensuality is also the inspiration for Viviane Sassen, who made every effort to retranscribe his eulogy of poetic abstraction through the lines made by contorted human bodies. These are only a few selections from an exhibition that can be read in many ways, which the salon located in the middle of the gallery for the occasion invites us to reflect upon.
Laurence Cornet
Aperture Remix
From October 17th to November 17th, 2012
Aperture
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, N.Y. 10001
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