Thinking About Photography
Dedicated to expanding our ideas about photography
Photography and Resistance
January 6th - April 10th
Immigrants at Ellis Island, George Grantham Bain Collection
I am the great-great-granddaughter and granddaughter of immigrants. On my mother’s side, it’s hard to imagine how desperate they must have felt when they left Ireland - the home of everyone they knew. On my father’s side, my Puerto Rican grandmother was barely out of her teens - already with several children, when she came here. In both cases, I believe these were journeys of desperation - to leave behind everything you know and go to a very different land where they might not understand you. How hard is it to make a life from scratch? The history of immigration is also a road map for where/when life was most desperate throughout the world. I often think about their lives and how hard it must have been to come here for a better life - what courage it took. That was part of my inspiration for this showcase. However, even as I write this, I am aware that the land we came to already had vibrant people and cultures living there for millennia. Real life is complex and messy - and that's a big part of why resistance is essential.
“Our Existence is Political” - Mickalene Thomas
There are so many ways to interpret resistance - for me, it’s about the power structure. Who writes history and who decides that the narrative will be. I see resistance as a refusal to stay forgotten, to stay lost, to stay silent. It’s about having a voice in where the light will be shown - what becomes illuminated and is deserving of our attention. It’s about countering the narrative that we’ve been handed by adding our stories.
Art has a long history of being part of the resistance, Goya’s etchings of war and abuse, Picasso’s Guernica which lays bare the brutality of war. Even something as simple as Van Gogh painting his shoes was revolutionary in its time - painting was to elevate, not lay bare the realities of life. Artists resist by enlarging the accepted narratives, by showing what has been ignored, forgotten or buried. Art can bring reminders of what’s important and why - it becomes that extra voice at the table that refuses to stay silent and re-centers the dialog.
Photography is often on both sides of an issue - part of the problem as well as the solution. Living in California, we are part of the border experience and I was impressed by several artists and organizations exploring that space. The AMBOS project was founded by artist Tanya Aguiñiga, it's a bi-national collective that works with communities on both sides of the border. They record "what life looks like along the length of the US/Mexico border for those who are unfamiliar with the realities that take place there." The Wall is another interesting project by photographer Griselda San Martin that "focuses on the experiences of people at Friendship Park, a bi-national park located in the border region of San Diego, United States, and Tijuana, Mexico." In a related field - I highly recommend the film Kneecap, based on a true story about the first native-language Irish/Gaelic rap band. You might not be aware that the English criminalized the language and this film hits on both areas of censorship - rap and their language.
The photographers in this showcase are giving voice to those who have been silenced. They celebrate lives and cultures that persist despite outside forces to conform. They document changes to our fragile environment and the impact it has on the land and those that inhabit that land. From PhotoBook Journal we have a collection of six book reviews that remind us of the human cost and impact of world events.
Natalie Bravo-Barbee
© Natalie Bravo-Barbee
© Natalie Bravo-Barbee all rights reserved
Flores de Fimicidio
In January 2019, an Argentine news article detailed a woman's murder at the hands of her male partner. The article noted an increase in violence against women in Argentina and it shared the victim's photograph. The image of this woman haunted me: the Flores de Femicidio project was born.
Flores de Femicidio / Femicide Florals is a memorial for women murdered by men (femicide) in her native land of Argentina. There were 327 femicides in 2019, in Argentina alone. I began by researching each woman’s story and creating an archive for each victim that included media stories and traces found on social media.
My work for the previous 5 years had been focused on using the alternative-photographic process called cyanotype. The same process created the flowers. The petals were hand-drawn on sheets of 22x30 inch watercolor paper, cut out, sorted into bags, each petal was hand-coated with cyanotype emulsion, exposed using my UV exposure unit, developed in my kitchen sink, shaped, dried, and assembled. The shadows captured on each petal were from various plants and laces. Some flowers came from my own garden located here in Queens, others I bought from markets. Floral lace has been a symbol of femininity that I use regularly in my cyanotypes and it felt natural to include in this project. Each cyanotype flower took a minimum of 10 hours to make.
Each flower consists of between 8-35 petals. All flowers are unique. Though some might appear similar there are differences. Each time the dried flowers were pressed against the paper to expose the cyanotypes, they crumbled and were no longer useable. Each flower is as unique as the woman it represents. From each flower hangs a blue and white striped string similar to the old air mail envelopes used in Argentina. This string symbolizes my ties to these women in Argentina though I am in New York. On the other end of the string is a tag. The tag represents a body tag that identifies each victim.
The flowers serve as a physical manifestation of each lost woman and drive home the enormous scale of the loss and how violence against women is prevalent and needs to be addressed worldwide.
When someone says 327 women were murder by men, that is just an arbitrary number that one may or may not be able to imagine. I have built these cyanotype flowers as a representation of each woman. When one stands in a room with all these flowers, the overwhelming number of them has an impact when a life, a person, a woman is associated with each. In the U.S. the media haven’t adopted the usage of the term ‘femicide’ to describe gender based crimes against women every time it applies. If they did, it would become apparent how problematic these societal issues are in individual communities and how dire the need to address them is.
Mercedes Dorame
© Mercedes Dorame, all rights reserved
Living Proof
It is a strange experience, touching the walls of your apartment with the eyes of your grandmother. I found that memories play an allusive game with the mind. They are tucked away, buried, hidden, almost forgotten until light, patterns, and objects trigger the drawer where they reside to slowly slide open. Suddenly your home is their home, generations collide, and memories cross paths, melding into one existence. These images are the result of that collision. I made memories from photographs, photographs from memories. I've watched ideas turn into substance, flesh into skin tone, light into being.
This body of work emerged from a need to piece together a past that felt like it was slipping from my grasp. It was born from my experiences of feeling powerless as Tongva burial sites were disassembled and my ancestors were removed from their resting places. As a Tongva tribal member, I have observed and consulted on culturally sensitive archaeological sites in Los Angeles and Orange County. At times this entails examining cultural belongings (artifacts). However, more frequently I am encountering burial sites that have great emotional and spiritual significance.
The picture that forms is of a Native American family that does not have reservation lands to call home. The family members do not fit Edward S. Curtis's stereotype of the "vanishing race." They lived their entire lives in a city that tried to erase their culture, a city that was once their tribal land. They became and always were and will be the population of Los Angeles.
The exploration and research for this work began with a gift from my father, an archive of unfamiliar photographs that had been resurrected from old boxes in albums. It was exhilarating to see my family as I did not know them: on their wedding day, as young parents, in formal family portraits, and on the beaches of Santa Monica, where I myself spent so much time growing up. By combining these photographs with the intimate space of my home at the time, I worked to re-assign missing contexts and to reintroduce my family into my contemporary existence.
The Tongva are Always Present - Honuukvetemme’ Woont ‘Ekwaa
We are Future Generations - Toomshar ‘Eyootaarxen
Corina Gamma
© Corina Gamma
© Corina Gamma
© Corina Gamma
© Corina Gamma
© Corina Gamma
© Corina Gamma, all rights reserved
Phthalo Blue
Phthalo Blue may be the best pigment to describe the blue of ice. In Northern Greenland, icebergs get locked into the frozen fjords for many months until the sea ice melts and releases them into the ocean. I captured these majestic, but also delicate icebergs while walking at midnight on the frozen fjord. The midnight sun was out but a slight sprinkle of snow diffused its light, giving the surrounding a heavenly appearance. These photographs evoke the silence and serenity I experienced at the time of capture.
Florence Iff
© Florence Iff
© Florence Iff
© Florence Iff
© Florence Iff
© Florence Iff
© Florence Iff
© Florence Iff, all rights reserved
Nature Morte
The loss of biodiversity is mainly due to the destruction of livelihoods by humans, but I can't help but think of all the animals in agriculture, zoos and laboratories that are kept and killed in undignified conditions for human needs. We take for ourselves the right to deprive other living beings of their rights and dignity, let alone grant them these, and we destroy not only their livelihoods, but our own as well.
We have developed technologies to see, understand and modify microorganisms and molecules, and every day we discover previously unknown life in the depths of the sea, the earth and the universe. Like a last gasp just before collapse, we catch a glimpse of the miracle of existence and experience it in shock.
In order to develop this knowledge and the associated technologies, since the Renaissance (mostly Western) scientists have collected vast amounts of "material", i.e. living creatures on all continents, of all populations and species. Animals of all classes were either exhibited in zoos or preserved in some form after dissection, whether in formaldehyde, stuffed or skeletonized for presentation to the general public. Only a very small number are exhibited in showcases, while tens of thousands of them are organized and archived like an invisible mass grave in non-public repositories. Of the visible specimens, we often do not know whether the species still exists or is already extinct.
Even today, wild animals are still hunted as trophies or mutilated to extract their parts as elixirs of life.Livestock are over-bred for our excessive meat consumption, fed hormones and antibiotics and kept in deplorable living conditions; in science, animal testing is still the norm in science, even though alternatives have long been available; and pets and zoo animals are deprived of their social environment and kept in habitats that are far too small and artificial for their species; not to mention fur farms and the known conditions.
Our treatment of animals and other living beings is primarily based on the demands of the human species and our attitude is not geared towards their needs.
My visits to natural history museums and zoos are characterized by ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, I admire man's curiosity and thirst for knowledge, on the other hand, my compassion for the weaker existences, i.e. the other living beings, hovers like a ghostly cloud of destruction in these bizarre and macabre spaces.
Beauty and violence are so close that they are often manifested simultaneously.
These still lifes are a testimony to the human condition and a tribute to all life.
Neither the images nor the text were generated with AI.
Alexey Vasilyev
© Alexey Vasilyev
© Alexey Vasilyev
© Alexey Vasilyev
© Alexey Vasilyev
© Alexey Vasilyev
© Alexey Vasilyev
© Alexey Vasilyev, all rights reserved
Tompo
Topolinoe village is located in the eastern part of Yakutia (Russian Federation), on the left bank of the Tompo River. The word ‘tompo’ in Even means ‘thread’. The population of the village is about 1000 people. Native people, evens, are representatives of one of the small nations of the North. The village was founded in the 30s of the XX century as a result of collectivization of reindeer herding and fishing farms.
Long ago the Evens had a nomadic life when were engaged in deer breeding. They were called reindeer people, they were the masters of the mountains and taiga. However, with the advent of Soviet authorities, the Evens were brought to a settled lifestyle, due to which the areas of their settlement were reduced, and the family continuity that preserved the language and culture was broken. The traditional economy, which had been developing over the centuries, was completely subordinated to the Soviet system.
The coexistence of humans and deer has always been a part of their daily life. The deer was everything for the Even: house, transport, food, warm clothes, shoes, bed. The Even proverb says: ‘No deer - no Even’. If the Evens will stop grazing reindeer – they will leave to the city, lose language, forget traditions, assimilate. There is a conflict between the Even way of life, culture which is tied to nature and the lifestyle of outer world. The modern world does not always leave enough opportunities for an alternative lifestyle. In spite of everything, reindeer people who lives by the river in harmony with nature, preserve their national identity, dignity and looking forward with hope.
PhotoBook Journal
I'm pleased to welcome back PhotoBook Journal with selections from Gerhard Clausing, Douglas Stockdale and their team of Contributing Editors on books that explore resistance. I encourage you to use the links to read the full versions of their thoughtful reviews.
The reviews are on a separate page, use this link.
