Her artistic career began with a kind of sleepwalking. In 1978, Sophie Calle spent her days strolling Paris. She had just returned to France after seven years of travel. Like so many artists and writers before her, she walked the French capital. On one of her ambles, she noticed a door ajar. It opened into an abandoned hotel connected to the former Orsay train station. It was as if she had drifted into a dream. She wandered the empty building and then left, taking note to come back. That year, Calle started making the work that she would become known for: following people, inviting them to sleep in her bed while she photographed them, taking on personas. A year later, she returned to Orsay. The building had remained abandoned. Calle took pictures, found discarded objects and documents. She even settled into a room on the fifth floor, 501. Nearly forty years later, Calle found herself at a dinner party where she was seated across the table from Donatien Grau, the head of contemporary programs at the Musée d’Orsay. She let slip something that no one at the museum knew: that Calle had squatted in the building, when it was abandoned, before it became the site of a museum. She told Grau that she had also kept a number of items from the old hotel and station.

Sophie Calle, photograph from the project Orsay, 2021
© the artist and ADAGP, Paris and courtesy Musée d’Orsay

Sophie Calle, photograph from the project Orsay, 2021
© the artist and ADAGP, Paris and courtesy Musée d’Orsay

Calle is the daughter of a well-known art collector and a journalist. A one-time student of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, who helped her get her first book published in 1983, Calle tells stories that question the relationship between self and other, the stories we tell about ourselves, or the traces that others leave. From her early to most recent books, such as The Hotel in 1984 to 2022’s The Elevator Resides in 501, she mixes a variety of formats and mediums simultaneously. More than many other artists of her stature, though, the name Sophie Calle conjures different things to different people. The art historian Yve-Alain Bois claims her “favorite mode of display” is “intertwining text and photo,” while others, such as the writer Heidi Julavits, in a conversation with the artist for Interview magazine, focus on describing the performance elements of her output. The novelist Paul Auster, Calle’s longtime friend and erstwhile collaborator, made the fascinating claim that she is “essentially a writer.” If so, perhaps she is among the first to write in an “expanded field,” to borrow a phrase from the art critic Rosalind Krauss, for the ways in which her stories rely on not only photography but also exhibitions, which many others have since followed. Discussing her significance, Grau remarks: “She has explored at once literature and the visual arts, and assembled them with many other methodologies, while unearthing and inventing new narrative forms that are simultaneously deeply personal and universal.” She herself apparently likes the phrase “narrative artist.”

Calle’s narratives are a precursor to contemporary autofiction, while also fitting in a longer twentieth-century literary tradition that juxtaposes text with image.

After that dinner party, Grau informed Laurence des Cars, then director of the Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie, who set up a meeting with Calle. Now, decades after she squatted in the building, the museum has exhibited The Ghosts of Orsay, an installation consisting of her photographs and detritus collected from the former train station and its hotel. The exhibition also coincides with the book The Elevator Resides in 501, published in both French and English editions by the Arles-based publishing house Actes Sud. For this book, Calle invited the celebrated French archaeologist Jean-Paul Demoule to write fictional ethnographic notes about the material. A short autobiographical text by Calle and the pieces by Demoule thread through her images of dilapidated rooms, exposed pipes, ledgers, empty hallways, abandoned mattresses, former room keys. The material has an oneiric quality, as if the museum were now manifesting a dream of its forgotten past.

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Sophie Calle, photograph from The Hotel (Siglio, 2021)
Courtesy the artist and Siglio

Sophie Calle, photograph from The Hotel (Siglio, 2021)
Courtesy the artist and Siglio

This exhibition and book further add to a wider reconsideration of Calle’s early work, particularly, as seen in her publications, how she blends writing with quasi-documentary photography—that is, a kind of documentary photography that may not quite aspire to truthfulness. Her narratives are, in some senses, a precursor to contemporary autofiction, writers such as Chris Kraus and Sheila Heti, while also fitting in a much longer twentieth-century literary tradition that juxtaposes text with image, from its Surrealistic origins in André Breton’s 1928 Nadja (about, indeed, a man who follows a woman around Paris) to the 1990s books by W. G. Sebald. In the United States, over the past decade, Siglio Press has been reprinting elegant editions of Calle’s early pieces, most recently The Hotel (reprint 2021; first published 1984, work from 1981), but also Venetian Suite (reprint 2015; first published 1983, work from 1980) and Address Book (reprint 2009; first published 1983 in the newspaper Libération, work from 1983).

In Address Book, Calle found a misplaced address book. Before returning it, she photocopied its contents and began contacting all of the people listed to render a portrait of its owner; her written notes of the meetings were published in Libération, presented alongside photographs. Venetian Suite chronicles her surveillance of a man in Venice. One afternoon in Paris, Calle had been following a random man only to lose him in a crowd. A few hours later, by chance, she was introduced to him at an art opening. He mentioned to her that he was going to Venice the next day. So, she, too, left for Venice, to continue shadowing him while taking clandestine photographs of his activities, like a private investigator. In 1981, Calle returned to Venice for the project that became The Hotel. Securing a job as a chambermaid, she photographed the sundry belongings of the hotel guests, while she made their beds, in order to attempt to reconstruct who they were. The Hotel, which includes her written observations and photographs, appeared as a book in 1984 after being exhibited the previous year at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris. Her seemingly matter-of-fact photographs are uncanny next to the narrative account of cleaning rooms and snapping pictures.

While photography is central to Calle’s art, there was for decades a long-standing truism that she was not particularly good at it. Her friend the French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, who wrote an essay on her at her invitation, “Panégyrique d’une faiseuse d’histoire” (1991), claimed that she “can’t even manage to take a proper photograph.” Her New York gallerist, Paula Cooper, once admitted that her photographs are not what people think about when they think of her art. She is not the sort of person who carries a camera with her; she only takes pictures when they are part of the rules of a project. (In a 2010 interview with Michel Guerrin in Foam magazine, the same year she received the Hasselblad Award, Calle stated that only with Take Care of Yourself, in 2007, did she begin to take more interest in the craft of photography.) But the loose compositions of her early work—the “bad” quality of the pictures, the poor or unbalanced framing, the out-of-focus subjects—have powerful effects. They provide the texts with an awkward intimacy, even in The Hotel where there are no human figures. Feeling as if they were taken quickly before a guest may return and interrupt her clandestine project, they also have the effect of disrupting the flow of reading. Her use of photographs is, in this way, less about documentation than it is about editing.

Throughout her pieces, inconsistencies in detail further emerge that give them a surreal quality. A number of the photographs of abandoned rooms seen in The Elevator Resides in 501, for example, were also used in Address Book. In 1993, Calle confessed to the art historian Bice Curiger that everything in The Hotel was truthful except the contents of one room, which she staged. In The Hotel, after days of being unable to enter room 45, she gains access, feeling “a certain lack of interest,” she writes. She claimed that she had only ten minutes. “I content myself with taking a few photographs: the carnival masks hung on the sconces, the Pierrot costume, the iron I noticed in the suitcase, two pairs of slippers waiting at the foot of each bed. In the folds of the sheets, I find a lobster claw.”

All of this feels like it comes out of a dream, the waking dream of a young woman who opens the door to an abandoned building, or an occupied hotel room. Over the past forty years, Calle has, in many ways, invented her own genre, somewhere between the traditional photobook and a literary piece. The juxtaposition of autobiographical writing with her particular style of quasi-documentary photography is her major aesthetic contribution, the skeleton key to her practice. Just as her photographs defamiliarize her texts, Calle’s work reflects on the relationship between self and other, how each of us remains a stranger to ourself. From 1980s books such as The Hotel up to her latest (based on material from those early years), she mixes writing and photography in ways that result in disrupting the absorptive experience of reading, as if jarring a sleeper out of a dream, or stepping into an even deeper one. “The dread of doors that won’t close,” states the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, “is something that everyone knows from dreams.” Her pictures are like the unclosed doors of her narratives.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, Summer 2022, “Sleepwalking.”

“I was interested in everything: the portrait of a person, of a house, of a wall . . . . Nothing was unimportant; everything was worthy of attention,” Guido Guidi says in these pages. Guidi was born in 1941, near Cesena, in Northern Italy, and since the 1960s has recorded quiet scenes in the Italian countryside and other parts of Europe, rendering rural towns, marginal landscapes, and lone figures in his signature soft palette. “All photographers love his work,” Martin Parr says, “but it remains so under the radar and underrated, it hurts.”

Guidi trained as an architect, painter, and draughtsman—and an abiding interest in perspective and modest architectural forms underpins his photographs. His influences range from Renaissance painting to the American photographers Walker Evans, Stephen Shore, and Robert Adams, whose work investigates place and vernacular architecture with cool detachment. Guidi, too, shares their interest in the “social landscape,” and throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he used a large-format camera to look at changes afoot in Italy as a result of industrialization or migration. In counterpoint to his photographs of the individual’s relationship to the world are these larger explorations, including his photographs of Porto Marghera, the industrial area next to Venice; Gibellina, Sicily, hit by an earthquake in 1968; as well as urban peripheries.

Guidi still lives in Cesena, where he continues to photograph; he teaches at universities in Venice and Ravenna. His books include A New Map of Italy (2011) and Veramente (2014), which have helped bring his work to a larger audience. For this issue, Guidi spoke with Antonello Frongia, a historian of photography—in person in Rubiera, near Reggio Emilia, and also by phone—about his influences, his contemporaries (including Luigi Ghirri), and on how, in his view, “the spirit lies in simplicity, not in rhetoric.”

Guido Guidi, Molino Cento, Cesena, 1998, from the series Percorsi (Paths)

Guido Guidi, Cimitero, Ronta, Cesena, 1986, from the series Traversate nel deserto (Desert crossing)

Antonello Frongia: When did you start taking photographs?

Guido Guidi: I was sixteen, in my third year of high school. I was only familiar with my family’s photo-album and my uncle’s amateur photographs—he was the one who made the album. What I was looking at was vernacular, not refined photography. When I began taking photographs, I was using a 6-by-6-format camera, but I followed my uncle’s example: I photographed my friends, although I was using a small tripod I had bought.

Frongia: And so was it in Venice that you began to be seriously involved with photography?

Guidi: In Venice I studied architecture, but it was a bit later, at the Corso Superiore di Disegno Industriale (an industrial design program) that I began to photograph with a certain awareness. I had been fascinated by perspective since the age of thirteen, when I enrolled in art school, so much so that during my first year I asked my older schoolmates to teach me the rudiments of perspective drawing. Modern painting completely abandoned perspective; as the art historian Daniel Arasse says, the white square on a white background destroyed perspective. Photography continues to be based on perspective, even if it may continually betray it.

Frongia: What do you mean by “betray”?

Guidi: In photography, as in Renaissance painting, perspectival deception is always part of the game. Perspective shows depth but also the negation of depth, namely the surface. Let’s call it a perspectival game, when a photograph or a painting reveals the plot of its own structure, the means by which it is made. Perspective describes how the world is made. During the Renaissance, Alberti spoke simply of commensuratio, measuring things; perspective as symbolic form emerges later. Perspective was invented to measure the concrete world, the public square, the res publica. From a political standpoint, this new idea revolutionized the then-Gothic world. Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence wanted to show that his policies were democratic, without deception, res publica. He wanted to show the things that took place in public squares, not in private rooms. Arasse says that after Palla Strozzi brought Gentile da Fabriano to Florence to paint a fairy-tale world suitable for a Gothic prince, Cosimo de’ Medici called in Filippo Lippi, who, along with Masaccio, Donatello, and Brunelleschi, began a new visual discourse based on the measuring of the world, on perspective.

Guido Guidi, Kaliningrad, Russia, 1994, from the series In Between Cities

Guido Guidi, Kaliningrad, Russia, 1994, from the series In Between Cities

Frongia: Which photographers did you know during your studies?

Guidi: At the Corso Superiore di Disegno Industriale, Italo Zannier showed Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Images à la sauvette (The Decisive Moment, 1952) and Paul Strand and Cesare Zavattini’s Un paese (1955). All Italian photography in the vein of neorealism was influenced by Strand, while more amateur photographers were looking at Cartier-Bresson. In 1967 I saw a Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, a large show with photographs of all sizes, some as large as bedsheets. The exhibition left me perplexed—the exotic places, the virtuosity—but I remember that I lingered over one of Indian women who were “raising up” the clouds [the photograph, Srinagar, Kashmir (1948) shows Muslim women praying at sunrise in the Himalayas]. When I began working seriously, I did some frontal portraits influenced by Strand. Actually, the first photographer I discovered on my own was Bill Brandt—the social Brandt, the one of the London catacomb metros, not the one who did nudes. But I was also interested in the aggressive photography of William Klein, with his harsh glance at people and the world, a very critical glance, very unflattering toward the subject. Many of my photographs from those years were polemical; they were about doing the opposite of the norm, like Klein and [Robert] Frank.

Guido Guidi, Cesena, 1967, from the series La figura dell’Orante (Orante figure)

Frongia: Is the sequence of photographs of the man reading a newspaper from this period?

Guidi: It must have been around 1967 or 1968. I shot it in the waiting room of the station in Cesena, when I was traveling to Venice, where I was studying. I shot what was in front of me without aiming at the person, but to the side, so I wouldn’t be noticed. Then I printed only the left part of the negative. I wanted to create a sequence; I wasn’t interested in capturing a particular moment, even if the sequence is then made up of distinct moments. The photographs are presented in the order in which they were taken, as the camera recorded them.

So, we spoke before about perspective; for Brunelleschi, who also built mechanical clocks, measuring the world also meant measuring time. Perhaps unknowingly, I think through the sequence I rediscovered this idea of perspective as an articulation of time, the opposite of the “decisive moment.” Maybe I was also influenced by the Conceptual art of this period, which I was following carefully.

Frongia: What relationship did you have with the art world when you began? How did Conceptual art influence you?

Guidi: These were years when Conceptual art was becoming established and clearly I kept up with what was happening, but I have never liked labels. For example, in my work it was considered Conceptual that I was writing beneath the photos, or showing two paired photos instead of only one. In fact I would do this in order to show the nature of process in my work. The root of these practices, which came to be called Conceptual, can be found in the Bauhaus: one of my teachers at the Corso Superiore di Disegno Industriale was Luigi Veronesi, who had brought a modernist, scientific attitude directly from the Bauhaus.

But I believe that all art has always been anachronistically Conceptual. And much neo-Conceptual work being done today bores me: it is sterile and academic. Conceptual art is often antithetical to looking, just as Duchamp was opposed to “retinal” art. But this phony distinction between the retina, which records, and the brain, which reasons, has been contradicted by neuroscience. Seeing pertains to the retina, and the retina pertains to the brain; it has the function of restoring already codified images to the brain; it already has the task of producing a thought.

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Frongia: Were you influenced by painting? You studied in an art school as a teenager.

Guidi: Art informel taught me the notion of rapid execution. Informel painting is resolved in a moment. Jackson Pollock’s gesture is also quick. It is a modality that goes back to East Asia, to the idea of the haiku, for example. Informel is closer to photography than one thinks, precisely because of the rapid action. In both, there is the pleasure of the material, but there is also a refusal to take time to think about things. You do it and it catches you by surprise, because you don’t know what you are doing until after it is done. For me, execution is important; if there is a reasoning process, it is amalgamated, mixed in with the material.

The further away one moves from the center, the less power one senses. I seemed to have more freedom working at the margins.

Frongia: Were you interested in the “social landscape” around you at some point?

Guidi: Really I was interested in everything: the portrait of a person, of a house, of a wall—it was all a pretext for experimenting. Nothing was unimportant; everything was worthy of attention. Certainly I was interested in the social landscape, in the 1960s and later. But the series of the man with the newspaper was also a sort of provocation; I anticipated some sort of reaction from him.

I understood that photography, in addition to being a piece of paper, could be understood as a performance, a social action in space and in time that can provoke a reaction on the part of the subject.

Frongia: Lee Friedlander’s work has been important to you. Do you remember how you came to know his work?

Guidi: I remember that I had seen Friedlander’s name in Ugo Mulas’s photobook New York: The New Art Scene (1967). And one of Mulas’s Verification photographs, the one featuring the mirror, was dedicated to Friedlander. As soon as Friedlander’s Self Portrait came out in 1970, I bought it, but it was only on the occasion of the lone photography biennial, Venice ’79, that I was able to meet him. That was when I heard him talk about the vernacular. He said he wasn’t interested in art photography, but in the vernacular photograph, in the snapshot. I could relate to this, of course, since I had grown up with the family photographs shot by my uncle, who had them printed at the photography store before gluing them into an album.

Guido Guidi, Aubervilliers, France, 1996, from the series In Between Cities

Guido Guidi, Montebelluna, Treviso, 1985, from the series Cinque paesaggi (Five landscapes)

Frongia: Did you photograph people as emblems of society?

Guidi: Even when I was just getting started, and I was photographing people, I was interested in men and women, period. Social types, such as those by August Sander, interested me less. There is a difference between the social landscape of Sander and that of American photographers like Lee Friedlander, but also Walker Evans and Paul Strand. In Evans’s work, people usually have great dignity. In Strand’s photographs, whether it’s a farmer or a mayor, they are heroes. It is no accident that Strand loved Piero della Francesca; the figures in Piero’s painting are regal. I have never photographed heroes; my focus was always on people, not on types. I didn’t want to make categories or taxonomies.

Even when I was making series, like the one on houses in the early 1970s, I didn’t limit myself to photographing only that type of subject. Houses alternate with people, curbstones, trees. Once again, it seems to me that photographing only one type of subject requires a project done at your desk; I direct my gaze only toward those things I consider an emblem of something else. At a certain moment I felt pushed to leave my room, like in Wim Wenders’s The Wrong Move (1975), when Wilhelm breaks the windowpane with the palm of his hand and leaves the house. I leave the house and what do I find? A house, an entrance door, a woman who passes by or who asks me something.

Frongia: I recall that back in the 1980s you suggested reading Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (1948).

Guidi: I also had a little book on Zen and the camera [Robert Leverant, Zen in the Art of Photography (1969)]. But even earlier, there was Minor White, although I think I am more secular than White. Let’s say that as a Mediterranean person I don’t insist on the “spirit,” or on the symbolism of clouds, as Stieglitz does, although I appreciate them a lot, as I also appreciate Strand’s clouds, laden with rain and prehistory and also spirituality. However, all this is excessively rhetorical.

I too am spiritual, but I wouldn’t want to be rhetorical. The spirit lies in simplicity, not in rhetoric.

Guido Guidi, Fosso Ghiaia, Ravenna, 1971, from the series Facciata (Façade)

Guido Guidi, Cesena, 1972, from the series Facciata (Façade)

Frongia: In the early 1970s you systematically photographed buildings, houses, small precarious constructions on the Romagna coast.

Guidi: That series was another way to confront leaving the ghetto of the unique photograph, the photograph-painting. The title of that work was Facciata (Façade); I went back to the dictionary definition, which in Italian refers both to the front of a building and the “face” of a sheet of paper. The subject of the series, however, came from Walker Evans. Early on, in 1971, I had the catalog for the retrospective John Szarkowski curated at MoMA, which, for a long time, was my point of reference for understanding Evans’s photography. I immediately liked his Victorian houses and above all those vernacular ones found in Alabama or in Ossining, New York.

Frongia: Was there a moment when you devoted yourself to a more “classical” vision?

Guidi: At some point I saw a sort of normalization of Klein’s and Frank’s rule-breaking attitudes, so my reaction was to go back to old work, to our great-grandfathers. My only radical passage was when I returned to old ways, using anachronistic tools like the 8-by-10-format camera. I was doing too many photographs; I was trigger-happy and producing a lot of unsatisfactory negatives. The photographic grain always bothered me, and, in fact, my first camera, when I was sixteen, was already 2 ¼ by 2 ¼ inches, which was an anachronism for that time. Around 1976 I managed to get a 5-by-7 inch, and from then on I began working with a scarcity of means, in black and white, and a bit later in color as well, initially with low-quality lenses and with disappointing results. Studying the work of American photographers such as Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, and William Christenberry, I built myself an 8-by-10 out of plywood, although until 1985 I continued to use insufficient lenses. It was clearly a return to Evans, to Weston, too, but above all to the old photographers from the nineteenth century, from Timothy O’Sullivan to Atget. Using a large-format camera was also a polemic with my friend Luigi Ghirri, who said, “What good is such sharp sight when we are in a dead end?”

Frongia: What did Ghirri mean?

Guidi: I believe that Luigi, citing Shakespeare, was thinking about the general situation; everything becomes topsy-turvy; life, time, everything goes to rack and ruin. It was like saying: “I was ship- wrecked, and what good is it to collect stones or pay attention to blades of grass?” The psychologist Ruggero Pierantoni says that there are two ways of reacting when one is shipwrecked: there are those who start screaming in desperation, and those, instead, who gather up the remaining fragments of wood to build a raft. You need keen eyesight for looking carefully at all the details around. I think that Luigi recognized the shipwreck and that he took shelter in classical order, in a central view. But there was one thing we had in common: an interest in art, especially in old painting. I was more interested in the early Renaissance; Luigi, especially later, was interested in Bernardo Bellotto, in Caspar David Friedrich, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Guido Guidi, Mercato Saraceno, 1985, from the series Cinque paesaggi (Five landscapes)

Guido Guidi, Romea, 1987, from the series Via Romea

Frongia: In this view of a poplar grove on the Via Romea you seem to respond to certain elements that characterize Ghirri’s later work: perspective, the Italian countryside, the snow . . .  

Guidi: It is a photograph in the neoclassical tradition, with a central vanishing point at the back. Of the photographers of my generation, Luigi Ghirri was also very interested in perspective, and he was very precise about locating the vanishing point in a central position. It seems to me that for Ghirri this idea is connected to the desire to represent infinity, which is a romantic idea. My attempt, instead, has always been to escape from the idea of romantic infinity, to return to physical reality. In this photograph the vanishing point is central, but this barrier I put in the foreground is symptomatic: the earth and the snow are the archaic, primitive site, the place of childhood, of the defenseless eye, nonliterary.

Frongia: Your discourse on perspective as a description of the res publica might seem to lead to the Italian piazza, but unlike photographers of your generation such as Ghirri, Mimmo Jodice, and Olivo Barbieri, you spent little time in historical cities, paying more attention instead to uncertain places with little structure. Why?

Guidi: Because I am interested in interstices. The res publica is also and above all outside the center. In medieval tradition, as Pierantoni points out, the Madonna is positioned at the center of the painting, Saint Joseph stands next to her, further to the side are minor saints, and even further away are the little angels who fly about. The further away one moves from the center, the less power one senses. I seemed to have more freedom working at the margins, like the little angels. The very fact of working with photography, instead of with the “fine arts,” has given me the possibility of working in a free zone, with less embarrassment and more confidence, in an area where the academy and the art system have less power.

Frongia: In Italy, your attention to the marginal has often been commented on as a denunciation of disorder, of the destruction of the landscape. Do you share this interpretation?

Guidi: I have never felt I was so denunciatory. Certainly at the beginning, around 1968, nothing was going well. My friends were all protesters and I, too, participated in this social rage. But in my work there is not so much denunciation as a growing awareness, an attempt to touch things, to relate to the world, to understand it even in moments of destruction, of downfall. There is a phrase by the Baroque writer Giambattista Marino that I once heard quoted on the radio. About to die, Marino realized that the yellow rose that, his entire life, he had sought to describe in his writings was none other than the yellow rose at the foot of his bed. And so everything I have sought to do has been to make photographs of that thing there, not only an idea about how to represent that thing. Or as Evans said, photography is a medium; it shouldn’t speak only about itself, but about the world.

Guido Guidi, Presina di piazzola sul Brenta, Padova, 1984, from the series Cinque paesaggi (Five landscapes)

Guido Guidi, Burgos, Spain, 1995, from the series In Between Cities
All photographs © and courtesy the artist

Frongia: You have spoken about sequence, about series. What role do books play in the definition of your work?

Guidi: The book is the most rational part of work, the construction you do later, advisedly. With a photograph, instead, I sometimes don’t know why I do it; I do it and that’s it. Ideally the book should precisely respect the photographic sequence as it was shot. In prints and in books, unlike what Evans did and what I myself did at first, I never cut parts of the negative. I like for photographs to be seen as I have shot them, out of a sort of ontological respect for the camera, which entails a slight sin of hubris: not correcting signifies thinking one never makes mistakes. The importance of the sequence of the shots was confirmed to me in an encounter in Venice with photographer and curator Nathan Lyons in 1979. He suggested having an empty shot between one sequence and the next, in order to record on the contact print the interruptions between one period of work and another. In a certain sense this is the position of the psychoanalyst who analyzes the dreams one has, night after night, comparing the different dream-frames: Why, after photographing that chipped wall, did you photograph that pile of gravel, or that sky? And it is a method that is a bit

Surrealist, perhaps. But in the book the sequence is about communication; I want what I show to be intelligible not only to me, but also to others. Usually the problem is finding a visual connection between different moments. To achieve this result, I try to make sequences, not series, avoiding the creation of a rift between photographs, and working in a way so the subsequent photograph has a dialectic with the previous one. There must be a dialogue, but this dialogue is not literary. It is visual, between façades, between faces, between faces that look at themselves in the mirror, or look askance.

Translated from the Italian by Marguerite Shore.

When photographer and social activist Fred Lonidier was selected for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, it came as a surprise to some. The last time the seventy-two-year-old professor had shown at the Whitney was his debut in 1977, nearly forty years earlier. But what always distinguished Lonidier’s rigorous documentary work—his unwavering and unrepentant focus on labor and class struggle— was in 2014 suddenly at the forefront of American politics. And many of the most pressing issues of the 2016 presidential election and in recent social activism—including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the insurgent Democratic primary campaign of Bernie Sanders—continue to be about labor issues. Numerous problems and discourses affect workers today: achieving income equality, fighting racial discrimination, compensating for outsourced production, accommodating guest workers and immigrant labor, raising the minimum wage, revising global trade policies, and adjusting to the information-economy workforce. Lonidier directs his photography toward these concerns and the workers struggling with them. He has served as president of the local teachers’ union, and his artworks have been commissioned by unions and exhibited in spaces where workers gather. As Lonidier said to me recently, “My work is for, by, and about class struggle through organized labor.”

The forum through which Lonidier engages workers is an expanded documentary practice that combines straightforward photo-text panels with direct action. In the mid-1970s, Lonidier was a key member of a tight circle of photographers and artists at the New Left hotbed of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), which included photographers Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, and Phel Steinmetz. As part of what was then called the New Documentary movement, these ardently Marxist photographers used theoretical texts and innovative photographic projects to mount a trenchant critical and artistic challenge to postwar humanist photography. Their coherent program of oppositional cultural practices disputed the patronizing sentimentality of much liberal documentary, with its banal construction of victims without agency, arguing that such images were merely a politically disengaged form of artistic self-expression. They challenged traditional fine-art venues, such as museums and galleries, and argued for a more militant and engaged documentary photography, one that would democratize the medium by undercutting its purported objectivity, expose the systemic economic and political systems that shaped photographic “truths,” allow voiceless workers and oppressed minorities to speak for themselves, and yoke their activist cultural criticism to pragmatic political change.

Of these artists, Lonidier was in many ways the most politically engaged and most committed to broad-based critiques of American capitalism. A former Peace Corps volunteer and convicted Vietnam War resister, Lonidier initially studied photography at UCSD as a way to make a living, possibly as a commercial photographer. But his MFA thesis project, a piece titled 29 Arrests (1972), already demonstrated his sly understanding of Conceptualism and how to disrupt the conventions of photographic tradition while foregrounding political activism. The work consists of a series of near identical shots of twenty-nine student antiwar protesters, each being held by cops while a police cameraman takes the person’s portrait. Lonidier adopted a position just behind the official photographer, offering a framing perspective that the mug shots would block out: the legions of seemingly unnecessary police surrounding the nonresistant protesters. Lonidier’s point of view and deadpan style mock the protocols of professional photojournalism. His images almost comically avoid the protest’s dramatic confrontations, showing instead the bureaucratic processing of the accused and the state apparatus in which they are enmeshed.

Lonidier’s project reveals to workers the corporate logic and patterns that lie behind specific incidents and complaints, and encourages solidarity and activist responses.

Lonidier’s best-known work, The Health and Safety Game: Fictions Based on Fact (1976–78), is an extended rumination on the brutality of the workplace and the casualties that result. He examines in explicit detail the routine violence of on-the-job injuries, which he portrays as a deliberate calculation sanctioned by the economic “game” of American industry. Across twenty-six panels that look like part of a science fair, Lonidier exposes the impact of corporate decision making, which coldly weighs the negative aspects of workers’ injuries against the steep costs of preventing them. Many of the photo-text panels feature case studies of specific incidents (“Oil Worker’s Burns,” “Office Worker’s Nerves,” “Graduate Film-maker’s Nail”), offering garish photographs of the injuries, as well as step-by-step timelines of the wounds, statements from workers, responses of employers, and testaments to the drawn-out struggles for treatment and compensation. Other text panels explain the various moves available to workers and management within the game. When confronted with health and safety concerns, management can, for example, bust the union, lobby politicians, move to another state, hire undocumented workers, underreport, counter with public relations, or simply violate the standards. Against such tactics, employees have few remedies. Lonidier’s project reveals to workers the corporate logic and patterns that lie behind specific incidents and complaints, and encourages solidarity and activist responses. “I always look for the submerged, missed, or forgotten labor issue,” Lonidier once wrote. “Much of what I have to say is already known and discussed or suspected by workers themselves. It may only be a question of legitimizing or distilling and organizing certain ideas rather than teaching in the one-way sense.”

But if The Health and Safety Game is critical of labor relations, other works, like the fifty-six panel I Like Everything Nothing But Union (1983), constitute a wholesale glorification of union workers marching in solidarity. Commissioned by the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, AFL-CIO and permanently installed in San Diego’s Labor Council Hall, this work was designed specifically to honor the diversity of the union, a view that goes against the univocal stereotype of blue-collar labor. Lonidier’s photographs depict a range of union members at their jobs, from clerical workers to musicians; accompanying text panels quote pithy statements from the laborers that freely offer views on the role of the union, pride in their work, and the ways labor conditions affect their lives, both on and off the job. The dedicated voices captured in this massive and optimistic study counter the conventional view of a silent workforce, grumbling about their lot and unable to represent their own interests. Instead, Lonidier presents a diverse, articulate, and highly opinionated community of workers with clear ideas about how best to achieve constructive political change.

As much as Lonidier’s work reflects a mutating transformation of documentary photographic practice, it also engages with a reawakened social art movement. His long-standing documentary project N.A.F.T.A. (Not a Fair Trade for All), begun in the mid-1990s, suddenly seems timely as it dovetails with widespread political condemnation in the United States of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which eliminated tariffs for trade between Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Even former president Bill Clinton, who signed the treaty in 1993, had insisted on amendments for granting worker and environmental protections and, more recently, has acknowledged some of NAFTA’s negative consequences. As Lonidier shows in the various iterations of his NAFTA documentary project, American companies have redirected production to low-cost light assembly plants, or maquiladoras, just across the Mexican border, thereby paying drastically lower wages and avoiding strict U.S. safety and environmental regulations. Lonidier uses photo-text panels to analyze in plain language and stark images the dire working conditions in the maquiladoras and the recent attempts by some Mexican workers to unionize. When one version of the project was shown at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Tijuana in 1999, administrators closed the exhibition, claiming that Lonidier was an agitator who had distributed leaflets to workers at a nearby factory. Lonidier responded with N.A.F.T.A. #16 A/B: N.A.F.T.A… Returns to Tijuana / T.L.C… Regresa a Tijuana (2005), in which he mounted his photomontages on the outside and interior of a large cargo truck, the kind used to carry immigrant laborers across the border, and toured it to maquiladora zones near Tijuana and colleges in San Diego.

Photographs of the truck highlighted Lonidier’s contribution to the 2014 Whitney Biennial, but the culmination of his participation was undoubtedly the evening teach-in that featured Lonidier lecturing on the connections between art and the working class, and also included a rousing performance by the red-shirted, fist-clenching New York City Labor Chorus singing “Solidarity Forever.” Foregrounding the voices of workers and emphasizing the role of pedagogy, Lonidier symbolically delineated strategies for a new alignment of social-movement art, bringing resonant cultural iconography to the workplace, and inserting labor concerns into the white-cube space of the art museum. “My commitment has long been that the concerns and exhibition of social art be connected in some way to organized efforts towards the same ends,” Lonidier says. “Art that intends to challenge the social world has its best chance in tandem with social/political organizations and their allies.” This ideal remains the incomplete project of an expanded documentary photography.

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This article originally appeared in Aperture, Spring 2017, “American Destiny.”

That first three-week trip to Haiti transformed me—both as a photographer and as a human being. I photographed a kind of world I had never experienced before, a world of emotional vibrancy and intensity: raw, disjointed, often tragic. I began to explore other places—in the Caribbean, along the US-Mexico border—places, like Haiti, where life seemed to be lived on the stoop and in the street. Three years after my first trip to Haiti, I realized there was another emotional note that had to be reckoned with: the intense, vibrant color of these worlds. Searing light and intense color seemed somehow embedded in the cultures that I had begun working in, so utterly different than the gray-brown reticence of my New England background. Since then, I have worked predominantly in color.

Alex Webb: The Suffering of Light

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The Suffering of Light is the first comprehensive monograph charting the career of acclaimed American photographer Alex Webb. Gathering some of his most iconic images, many of which were taken in the far corners of the earth, this exquisite book brings a fresh perspective to his extensive catalog.

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Alex Webb: The Suffering of Light

Photographs by Alex Webb. Text by Geoff Dyer.

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Description

The Suffering of Light is the first comprehensive monograph charting the career of acclaimed American photographer Alex Webb. Gathering some of his most iconic images, many of which were taken in the far corners of the earth, this exquisite book brings a fresh perspective to his extensive catalog. Recognized as a pioneer of American color photography since the 1970s, Webb has consistently created photographs characterized by intense color and light. His work, with its richly layered and complex composition, touches on multiple genres, including street photography, photojournalism, and fine art, but as Webb claims, “to me it all is photography. You have to go out and explore the world with a camera.” Webb’s ability to distill gesture, color and contrasting cultural tensions into single, beguiling frames results in evocative images that convey a sense of enigma, irony and humor. Featuring key works alongside previously unpublished photographs, The Suffering of Light provides the most thorough examination to date of this modern master’s prolific, 30-year career.

Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 204
Number of images: 0
Publication date: 2011-05-31
Measurements: 13.2 x 12.2 x 0.9 inches
ISBN: 9781597111737

Press

The images – rich in color and visual rhythm – span 30 years and several continents. Of course, Haiti and the Mexican border are well represented, locales that opened up a new way to see.He has been able to render Haiti – a place often depicted for its chaos – with a precise eye, finding personal moments that are as still as they are complex. He can use shadows as skillfully as a be-bop musician to set the tempo. The people in his frames can look like dwarfs being stomped on by giant, disembodied feet. He can make an American street seem far more foreboding than any Third World slum.–David Gonzalez”The New York Times” (12/18/2011)

Contributors

Alex Webb (born in San Francisco, 1952) has published more than fifteen books, including Aperture titles Brooklyn:The City Within (2019, with Rebecca Norris Webb), La Calle: Photographs from Mexico (2016), On Street Photography and the Poetic Image (2014, with Rebecca Norris Webb), and a survey of his color work, The Suffering of Light (2011). Webb has been a full member of Magnum Photos since 1979. His work has been shown widely, and he has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.

Geoff Dyer (born in Cheltenham, England, 1958) is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as nine non-fiction books. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages and have won numerous awards.. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.

Not a typical documentary photographer or photojournalist, I’ve worked essentially as a street photographer, exploring the world with the camera, allowing the rhythm and the life of the street to guide and inform the work. For me, everything comes, first and foremost, from the street. Whatever insights—sociopolitical, cultural, or aesthetic—I may have into the societies I have photographed over the years come not from preconception, but from the process of wandering the street. At times, I feel the street can sometimes be a kind of bellwether, hinting at sociopolitical changes to come.

Over the years, my way of seeing in color, which first emerged in the tropics, has expanded into various projects, leading me not just to other parts of Latin America and to Africa, but also to Florida and to Istanbul. I have been consistently drawn to places of cultural and often political uncertainty—borders, islands, edges of societies—where cultures merge, sometimes clashing, sometimes fusing. Some of my projects have taken years to complete. Others have been briefer. Many have overlapped. Sequenced more or less chronologically, this book reflects the sometimes chaotic, sometimes mysterious process of creation, interweaving projects and obsessions, themes and passions, cultural tensions and offbeat moments, into one continuous chronicle of the street, from 1979 to the present.

Alex Webb, Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, 1996

Alex Webb, Istanbul, Turkey, 2001

Alex Webb, Bombardopolis, Haiti, 1986

Alex Webb, León, Mexico, 1987

Alex Webb, San Ysidro, California, 1979

Alex Webb, Munich, 1991

Alex Webb, Ethiopia, 1997

Alex Webb, Alto Paraguay, Paraguay, 1990

Alex Webb, Havana, 2000

Alex Webb, Gouyave, Grenada, 1979
All photographs courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

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This text originally appeared in Suffering of Light (Aperture, 2011).

These photographs were made during the summer of 1979 in a small residential community outside Shelton, Connecticut. The name of the community is The Maples, and it covers a stretch of land about one mile long on the banks of the Housatonic River.

The residents have always liked to think of themselves as river people, and my intention was to document their style of life through color photography.

Summertime seemed to bring out the most of what could be seen at The Maples. The people reunited with the natural surroundings, and their activity was refreshingly uninhibited and festive. I was particularly drawn to the way people adorned themselves and their surroundings, according to their age group and generation.

This article was originally published in Aperture, issue 91, Summer 1983.

Born in 1942, Bertien van Manen began her career in the 1970s as a fashion photographer. Commercial photography, however, soon left her wanting and unfulfilled; like many photographers of her generation, inspired by Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), she subsequently shifted toward an expressive and intimate documentary approach. Some of her earliest work addressed the lives of immigrant women in her home country, the Netherlands, and the curiosity that motivated that work prompted her to explore communities all over the world, from bootleggers in Appalachia to villagers in the former Soviet Union, for books including A hundred summers, a hundred winters (1994); East Wind West Wind (2001); Let’s sit down before we go (2011); Easter and Oak Trees (2013); and Moonshine (2014). Her photographs, made on trips throughout Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia, the United States, and, most recently, Ireland, often focus on the human experience of undertaking a journey.

Although van Manen’s work has been exhibited in many of the world’s leading museums and is held in major collections, she remained something of a photographer’s photographer. Of her unique snapshot sensibility, the Swedish photographer JH Engström notes: “If I’m distracted by all the photography out in the world, Bertien’s work reminds me that photography is all about the heart.”

On the occasion of Manen’s death on May 26, 2024, we revisit the photographer’s conversation with Kim Knoppers for Aperture’s “Interview Issue” in 2015. Knoppers, curator at Foam, Amsterdam, visited van Manen at her home studio, located on the third floor of a classic canal house on Amsterdam’s Keizersgracht, for a conversation about the path of her well-traveled career and what it means for her to revisit older bodies of work, including her mid-1970s Budapest photographs, which will form her next book project. —The Editors, 2024

Kim Knoppers: You began making photographs in 1973, after you graduated from university, when you had a family with two small children. Why did you feel the urge to change tack?

Bertien van Manen: I’d done a lot of translation work and taught French, but I was continually at home. I wanted to get outside. While studying French at the University of Leiden, I worked as a model for a while. I lost interest in that and thought, I’ll turn things around—I’m going to get behind the camera instead of being in front of it. That’s when I started photographing my children.

We had a party at our house, and the fashion and advertising photographer Theo Noort was one of the guests. He saw my photographs and asked me to be his assistant. Later, I worked at an advertising studio in Amsterdam. I knew nothing about photography or how to develop film. I learned all that from Noort and the studio.

Knoppers: How did you end up as an independent fashion photographer?

Van Manen: I first earned money as a photographer for the Dutch women’s magazine Viva. There, I photographed Sylvia Kristel [the stylish star of the 1974 soft-core porn film Emmanuelle, one of the first erotic films to be released worldwide by a big Hollywood studio]. The story making the rounds in the Amsterdam bars was that at the age of sixteen Kristel had announced, “You wait and see: I’m going to be famous.” She did a great deal to make that come true [laughs]. Kristel appeared in the first soft-core porn film and was naked all the time. I was one of few female photographers in fashion in Amsterdam. The models appreciated working with a woman instead of all those guys. They felt freer and less like objects of desire. So I had an astonishing amount of work.

Knoppers: Why did you leave fashion again, this time as a photographer?

Van Manen: In 1975, the photographer Kenneth Hope showed me The Americans by Robert Frank, and everything changed. How can you capture in words what he does? He wasn’t at all in the business of making beautiful photographs, yet that’s what they are. The coincidental, the inadvertent—I thought his photographs were magnificent. The roughness of his work and the absence of the spectacular appealed to me enormously. I immediately wanted to travel. The children were slightly older and I had the romantic idea to go to Budapest in the mid-’70s. It was such an old, baroque city that was then behind the Iron Curtain. I have showed the pictures I made there only twice: at the former Institut Néerlandais, in Paris, and in the magazine Street Life, the British equivalent of Rolling Stone. At the moment, I am revisiting this work.

Around this time, I burned my bridges at Viva because I was fed up with fashion—it was hollow— and went to work for Avenue, Nieuwe Revu, and Panorama. [Avenue was a Dutch fashion magazine inspired by Vogue, moving between popular and elite culture. Renowned writers and photographers were associated with it, such as W.F. Hermans, Cees Nooteboom, and Ed van der Elsken. In the 1970s Nieuwe Revu steered a left-wing, rebellious course perhaps best encapsulated as “socialism, sex, and sensation.” Both Nieuwe Revu and Panorama are part of a strong Dutch tradition of social reportage.] But I was not very connected to the editors of these magazines. I took my photographs and delivered them. I felt more attached to the scene around the leftist publication De Groene Amsterdammer. Photography in this magazine was actually marginal, but the editor in chief was impressed by my Budapest work and from that moment I worked regularly for him. This was toward the end of the ’70s and the early ’80s. Photography became more important for De Groene Amsterdammer, and Dutch photographers like Hans Aarsman, Taco Anema, and Han Singels were involved. Everyone who was left-oriented started at De Groene Amsterdammer. We had a good time at the office. Once I was asked to take a photograph of the editorial team behind their desks without clothes. I traveled with the Dutch writer Geert Mak to the United States to portray leftist Americans. We had to find them with a lantern [a Dutch expression].

Knoppers: What led you to embark on your first long-term, self-initiated project, Vrouwen te Gast (Women who are guests), in 1979?

Van Manen: I had had enough of the hectic life of working for magazines. I wanted to have more time to make less superficial photographs. I saw the 1975 book A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe by John Berger, which portrays the lives of guest workers. There are photographs in it by Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, Berger’s frequent collaborator. It remains relevant because the tension and effects of migrant labor are still major issues in Europe today. The introduction stated that unfortunately they hadn’t gotten around to documenting the women. No wonder, since it was made by two men! They hadn’t even made it through the door with the Muslim women.

That’s my subject, I thought, and in 1979 I started working on Vrouwen te Gast. I didn’t just photograph women who’d joined their husbands but also single women who’d come to the Netherlands to work. Suddenly those rural women were shut up alone in a tiny backroom apartment, unable to speak the language, and they sat there languishing behind closed curtains. I decided to group the women according to their countries of origin: Turkey, Italy, Spain, Morocco, Yugoslavia, Tunisia, Portugal, and Greece.

Knoppers: How did you manage to get into those women’s homes?

Van Manen: There were plenty of community centers for male immigrant guest workers. One center organized sewing lessons for their women. They helped me. The Muslim men wouldn’t let their wives be photographed casually in the house; for them an “official portrait” was enough. In the end the combination of posed and more spontaneous photographs worked well.

The book was published by the feminist publishing house Sara in Amsterdam. I had to spend a full day there defending the order of my edit in front of a collective of eight women. Ultimately I persuaded them that my edit was best. In the last paragraph of my text for the book, I noted that the Dutch women’s movement had done nothing for immigrant women. The book was a success because it got all sorts of things started for these women who were invisible and to whom no one had ever paid any attention before. It really had an impact. Dutch language courses for women were organized. Neighbors went to visit the women in their homes. The immigrant women came out of isolation.

Knoppers: Did you consider expanding the project to other countries?

Van Manen: Along with photographer Catrien Ariëns, I was commissioned by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to photograph the women’s movement in the Netherlands. Eva Besnyö [Dutch-Hungarian photographer, 1910–2003] rang me. They’d asked her first but she was unavailable. I felt honored and let myself be persuaded. But I’m not particularly proud of the book that came out of it. The texts are unbearable. For example, one of them explains what kind of ailments you get during menopause. I found myself in yet another of those halls full of gray-haired women in dungarees. Absolutely not photogenic.

Knoppers: Do you regard the early period of your work as a learning process in which you grew and reached full maturity with A hundred summers, a hundred winters [photographs taken between 1990 and 1994 in Russia]?

Van Manen: Yes, although there are also some really good photographs in Vrouwen te Gast. For A hundred summers, a hundred winters I started in black and white. But that didn’t work. Cartier-Bresson, and I don’t know how many others, had made nostalgic black-and-white photographs in Russia, but I found the colors there so extraordinary.

The colors of our Western clothing were synthetic, whereas there they were still making dyes from plants and flowers. The decision to photograph in color was extremely important.

Knoppers: How was it that you ended up in Russia?

Van Manen: I’d wanted to go to Russia for a very long time. My grandfather lived in a big house on a country estate in North Brabant, and there his relations from Poland and Russia would visit him regularly. One of them I was told to call Uncle Eugène, but he was really a cousin. As a little girl I found Uncle Eugène unbelievably exciting. That must have had something to do with it, unconsciously. In 1982 I went to Poland to make an editorial for Vrij Nederland [a Dutch magazine] about women living behind the Iron Curtain. I went with a philosopher of Polish descent who wrote the article. It was exciting because we brought fifty IUDs from a friend of my husband’s who was a gynecologist. Women used medieval methods for birth control, like foam tablets. I must have a photograph of the small factory where they made these foam tablets. We were caught at the border, but after giving the customs official one of the IUDs for his wife, he let us enter Poland. The Russian influence there was huge, of course. In 1987 I traveled to Russia for the first time with a communist journalist from the British paper the Morning Star. By then I’d taken a course in Russian and could speak the language a little. We went to Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, where there’s so much conflict now, a coal-mining region. I was keen to photograph the miners.

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I didn’t succeed in Donetsk. The union, which was heavily controlled by the communist government, arranged for a beautiful table with a white cloth and a buffet of Russian food at a woman’s house, and behind it stood a lady in traditional costume. It was a tourist attraction. One evening I literally broke out—I escaped from the people who were looking after me, the guards. During this time, the union was strongly orthodox and people were not allowed to talk to foreigners. I went and stood on the street and stuck up my hand. A car stopped and I said to the man at the wheel, “I want to go to where the shakhtery, the mineworkers, live.” He took me there. But they weren’t allowed to talk to foreigners, unfortunately.

I returned to Russia in 1989, to Moscow, to polish my Russian. My teacher asked if I’d like to come and live with his family. They had a spare room and it was a way for them to earn a little extra money. So that’s what I did. He lived there with his parents. I stayed in his house for several weeks. In total I went back fourteen times and traveled through Russia, Moldavia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Tatarstan, and Georgia. I always stayed in the houses of local people who became friends. I wanted to grasp the beauty and the mystery of daily life. “I haven’t seen you for a hundred summers, a hundred winters”—that’s what people in Russia say when they haven’t seen each other for a long time. It became the title of my book.

Knoppers: The people in your photographs seem to forget they’re being photographed. No doubt that has to do with the amateur compact cameras you use.

Van Manen: I started off working with Leicas and Nikons, but one day they were stolen from my house in Amsterdam. I took compact cameras but with good lenses with me because it was safer. They were just little toys, so they didn’t get stolen. People felt less threatened by them, anyhow. You’re with a guest who also takes photos, rather than with a photographer who’s your guest. I could leave them lying on the table and I always had about three of them with me. Sometimes people would start using the little cameras themselves. I was staying with Irina, who has since then become a good friend, and her aunt, and there were two boys of about ten. I arrived home in Amsterdam and looked at the contacts and thought: Was I so very drunk? Did I really make photos like that? Then I realized that the boys had been photographing each other, with bare bottoms and in other funny poses. Even the photograph of the little boy on top of the wardrobe that ended up in Let’s sit down before we go was made by them.

Knoppers: I find it extraordinary that you can get so close to people without making the observer of the book feel like a voyeur. Is that something you make a conscious effort to achieve or is it intuitive?

Van Manen: I’m always terrified I’m bothering people, and that they won’t like me.

Knoppers: That’s difficult, considering the kind of photographs you make, but it’s probably also your strength.

Van Manen: Yes, but sometimes the things I haven’t done keep me awake at night. I was brought up in a very Catholic environment, of course, and I’m totally fascinated by all those Russian Orthodox churches. One day I heard music coming out of a church in the countryside. I went in and saw the priest standing there. All the women were on their knees in a line in front of him. My god, I didn’t dare photograph that. I’m fearful of everything that has to do with the church.

Knoppers: The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapus ́cin ́ski wrote the foreword to A hundred summers, a hundred winters. How did that come about?

Van Manen: Joseph Brodsky [the Russian-American writer] was supposed to write the foreword. He visited me here in Amsterdam and it was great to see how enthusiastic he was, but he fell ill and died. Kapus ́cin ́ski had written a book called The Emperor (1978), which I found tremendous. Not a bad replacement, but it’s still a shame.

Knoppers: You said that your fascination with Russia is very personal. After the publication of A hundred summers, a hundred winters, you went to China to work on your next big project, East Wind West Wind [photographs made between 1997 and 2000]. Was there a similar personal link with China

My attention was turned in that direction by Paul Wombell, who at the time was director of the Photographers’ Gallery in London. He was in Amsterdam and he invited me to put together an exhibition at his gallery, but I was in a black hole. A hundred summers, a hundred winters had been so intense. He suggested I should go to China because the country was changing so much. I went there ten times before I finally knew what I was looking for. I traveled to both the major cities in the east and south, as well as rural village in the west, wanting to depict the daily life of common Chinese people. I always came back with beautiful calendar pictures, but that wasn’t what I was after. The tenth time I was with my friend Xiao Feng at his friend’s home, an apartment on the twentieth floor in the city of Chongqing. We’d been inside all day. In the late afternoon we went out. We got onto the street and the heat, the crowds, and all those voices came flying at me. There was a buzz all around me. Suddenly I knew that I wanted to capture that vibrant feeling. I immediately started photographing things that at first you may not realize can be truly magnificent. One photograph was taken in a small movie theater where movies were shown twenty-four hours a day. Young people escaped their domestic environments and the gaze of their parents by going there.

Knoppers: All your books, with the exception of Easter and Oak Trees, which features black-and-white photographs of your family taken between 1970 and 1980, are set in areas and communities that are fairly closed.

Van Manen: In Siberia I walked through a village and people came out of their houses to greet me and invited me in for a cup of tea. In China, in a small town in the north, they announced through the town’s loudspeakers that a foreigner was around. “There’s a white woman who looks different. She’s a person too, just like us. Leave her in peace and don’t touch her.” My guide translated it for me. I thought that was fantastic.

Knoppers: For Let’s sit down before we go [photographs taken in Russia between 1991 and 2009] you asked the photographer Stephen Gill to go through all the contact sheets from your Russia archive. Why did you desire to look back?

Van Manen: I kept coming upon photographs and thinking, Why isn’t this in the book? There turned out to be far more intriguing photos than I’d expected. Of course I couldn’t be sure, because they’re my own photographs. So I asked Stephen. The expression “Let’s sit down before we go” comes from the Orthodox Church. People would kneel for a moment to pray before starting out on long journeys with horses and carts, because there were all kinds of dangers along the way, such as wolves and Siberian snow. It’s still the custom, but now they do it quickly as a kind of ritual. [Van Manen demonstrates, briefly sitting down and then getting up again.] I thought it was a good title for a project in which I too sit down and go through my archive. A moment of reflection.

Knoppers: The photographs in Let’s sit down before we go were made in the same period as A hundred summers, a hundred winters, but they’re very different in style. Why is that?

Van Manen: Stephen Gill and I paid attention to different things in the editing. Twenty years had passed since I took the photographs. A development had taken place in photography and in myself. This book is far freer than A hundred summers, a hundred winters. At that time certain things weren’t “allowed.” The Robert Frank method was far from accepted by everyone in those days. Nothing was supposed to be in the picture that didn’t “belong” there. Everything had to be neatly within the frame. Overexposure was a mortal sin. But overexposure produces a strange and exciting effect. In Let’s sit down before we go imperfections became a unifying theme.

Knoppers: You always get very close to other people. And you’ve said that you sometimes have difficulty with that, with taking such intimate pictures. Easter and Oak Trees is based on family photographs from your archive. You reveal yourself and your family during intimate, private moments. What is the setting for Easter and Oak Trees?

Van Manen: At Easter I usually went with my family to my grandfather’s large country estate in the province of North Brabant. We have a favorite Joe Cocker song in the family, on the record Mad Dogs & Englishmen. At one point Joe Cocker says, “This izzzz Easter.” He can say that really beautifully. And the estate is full of oak trees.

Knoppers: Have you asked your children, now adults, what they think of the book?

Van Manen: They think it’s beautiful, but they have mixed feelings about some of the photographs.

Knoppers: Do you often find that people who end up in your books are ultimately shocked by how they appear?

Van Manen: People look so differently at themselves than the way I look at them. That’s why it’s often difficult when you send them the photographs. I think they look great, but there’s always something wrong with their figure or with their chin. Nowadays, of course, there are so many opportunities to photograph yourself. Everyone makes some kind of glamour photograph so that they’re shown to the best possible advantage and can direct every aspect. Those are of course very different types of photographs than the ones I make.

Knoppers: Moonshine, your most recent project with MACK, is about mineworkers’ families that you visited between 1985 and 2013 in the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Before that, you tried to get in touch with mineworkers in Donetsk. Why are you so interested in mining communities?

Van Manen: I grew up in the mining region of Heerlen, in the south of the Netherlands. My father worked at the state mines and I attended a local Catholic school where I was surrounded by miners’ daughters. I often visited their homes and I loved it there. At my friends’ houses everything happened in a little room where the windows were steamed up from soup on the stove. The mothers fascinated me. I found it so cozy there. At our place it was all a bit colder. I felt far more at home with those mineworkers’ families. Also, my very first photography project was on miners in a little mining village in West Yorkshire, UK, called New Sharlston.

Knoppers: For the last year and a half you have been photographing in Ireland. Do you have the feeling that you’ve already found what you’re looking for there?

Van Manen: Actually, I do, though I go back to perfect it and to have more material to choose from.

Knoppers: That’s relatively quick compared with your other projects. Why do you think that might be?

Van Manen: For my other projects I photographed people in their own environment. That was my great fascination. In Ireland I dispensed with the people and reflected more on the atmosphere and on the death of my husband Willem. He died seven years ago. I photograph the Irish west coast a great deal: It is the end of Europe, the end of the world. It’s about endlessness, about ruin and death. It’s poetic and mythical.

At the moment I’m reading everything I can get my hands on about Ireland. Much of the literature from Ireland is about families with lots of children, steamy relationships, Catholicism, a father who drinks and tyrannizes and lashes out. The mother is kind and cares for the children. There are of course beautiful lines about nature, by novelists like John McGahern, or about the sea, by John Banville. Or by poets like Michael Longley, with his poetic everyday directness, or Seamus Heaney, whose poems sometimes are mythical and go back to anonymous early Irish lyrics. But I also read a lot of French and German literature. There’s now a little French bookshop two streets away from me and it’s wonderful. I need literature when I’m traveling. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Gogol—all those magnificent Russian books. They’ve all become friends of mine.

Translated from the Dutch by Liz Waters.

This interview was originally published in Aperture, issue 220, “The Interview Issue,” Fall 2015.

Although Paolo Gasparini was born in Italy, Venezuela is his adopted home. He has spent his life documenting the cities and people of Latin America, south of “the northern imperialist,” as he refers to the United States in the following interview. Born in 1934 in Gorizia, in Northeast Italy, he emigrated to Caracas in 1954 to join his mother and older brother. This was a time of oil fueled growth, prosperity, and urban expansion as well as inequality, poverty, and cramped living conditions in new housing complexes. Working alongside his architect brother Graziano, Gasparini sought to document both the transformation of the built environment and the city’s inhabitants.

In 1961, impassioned by the Cuban Revolution, Gasparini traveled there and stayed for four years. Later, in the 1970s, he was commissioned by UNESCO to photograph urban centers from Mexico to Argentina, focusing on both architecture and the stark social inequality he witnessed. The project resulted in the photobook Para verte mejor, América Latina (The better to see you, Latin America, 1972), now considered a classic.

Gasparini has continued to make work, often reinterpreting his still photographs through the use of sound and elements of performance. In 1995, he represented Venezuela at the 46th Venice Biennale. For this interview, Sagrario Berti, a Venezuelan photography curator, researcher, and longtime friend, met with Gasparini at his home and studio in the Bello Monte neighborhood in Caracas. They spoke about his recent book Karakarakas, which features six decades’ worth of Caracas work; what it means to identify as a Latin American photographer; and why, for Gasparini, photographs should still be seen as a product of ideology.

Sagrario Berti: What led you to immigrate to Latin America and settle in Venezuela?

Paolo Gasparini: In order to avoid enlisting in the army, before turning twenty-one I moved to Caracas. My father and two brothers were already living there. My mother traveled constantly to Venezuela where Graziano, one of my brothers, was working as an architect and photographer. He was conducting research on popular, indigenous, and colonial architecture of Latin America.

Berti: Were you already taking photographs?

Gasparini: Yes. After one of my mother’s trips to Caracas, she came home with a Leica camera for me as a gift from Graziano, and at seventeen I began photographing. In Gorizia, Italy, my girlfriend Franca Donda and I frequented a photography studio. That’s where we learned developing and copying techniques. I also took part in the exhibitions organized by Gorizia’s photo-club, where I showed photographs of fishermen, peasants, and circus workers.

Berti: And in Caracas?

Gasparini: Having only been in Caracas for eight days, thanks to Graziano’s architect friends, I began photographing the buildings of Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Venezuela’s great modernist architect: the Central University of Venezuela and the construction of the 23 de Enero [January 23] public housing blocks. I settled into a rich cultural world full of writers, philosophers, critics, and thinkers from the magazine Cruz del Sur (1951–61), a publication run by Violeta and Alfredo Roffé that linked cultural issues with societal problems and served as a focal point for leftist intellectuals who opposed the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952–58). I worked for Villanueva and for architects like Pedro Neuberger, Dirk Bornhorst, and Jorge Romero Gutiérrez on El Helicoide, a proposed shopping mall and industrial exposition center in Caracas built on a rock of gigantic proportions that was never finished. Now it’s a prison.

Berti: You alternated between being an architectural photographer and documenting various neighborhoods. You also traveled around the interior of the country. Which work from this period do you consider most important?

Gasparini: My architectural work, without a doubt. Remember, this period marked the beginnings of publicity and advertising in Venezuela. I had offers to work in publicity that were much better paid, but I turned them all down because I was not, and am still not, interested in advertising photography used to sell products. I traveled either by myself or with Graziano. We went all over the Paraguaná. Peninsula, an arid territory, between 1954 and 1960. We traveled from Los Castillos on the Orinoco River—in the eastern part of Venezuela—and ended up enjoying ourselves and admiring the white houses of the Falcón State in the west. Then we moved onward to the market of Los Filúos in the Guajira Peninsula, on the border of Colombia, and crossed the Andes. Over the course of these travels I made two photo-essays: Las Salinas de Margarita (The salt mines/lakes of Margarita) and Bobare, el pueblo más miserable del Estado Lara (Bobare, the most miserable town in the State of Lara). Both were published in Cruz del Sur. I photographed Bobare under Paul Strand’s documentary influence. Franca, who was living in Paris at the time, contacted Strand—who was self-exiled in Paris, fleeing from McCarthyism in the U.S.—and showed him the work that had been published in the magazine, as well as other photographs that I had taken in Venezuela. Strand brutally criticized Bobare. At one point he told me, “I had to look at it under a yellow light in order to soften the unpleasant yellow hue of the print.” But he liked the other photographs. [Gasparini and Strand met later, in Orgeval, France, in 1956.]

Berti: Aside from Strand, what were your influences?

Gasparini: When I was eleven, I saw the horrors of World War II: photographs of bodies that had been mutilated, hung, and shot. The photographs belonged to a Yugoslav partisan and guerrilla fighter. This was my first experience with photography and it caused a deep impression.

My visual imagination was also fed by magazine photography and film. During the postwar period I went to the Venice Film Festival; at the time, in the United States Information Agency offices, the American Army was projecting films in Gorizia and Trieste. In Venice I saw The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936); The River (1938), which was produced by the Farm Security Administration; [Robert] Flaherty’s film Nanook of the North (1922); The Photographer (1948), a documentary on Edward Weston; and the first images from the concentration camps. I saw films that hadn’t been screened in Italy because of the war, Gone with the Wind (1939) and Que Viva Mexico! (1930), for example, and, of course, the Italian neorealism of [Cesare] Zavattini, [Roberto] Rossellini, and [Vittorio] De Sica.

I became acquainted with the “American way of life” through magazines like Collier’s, Life, and Picture Post. I became enraptured by photography in the films of Paul Strand, such as Redes (1936), and I was especially drawn to the documentary photography, or rather the “social realism,” of his book La France de Profil [with Claude Roy, 1952].

So the basis of my imagination was the documentary propaganda disseminated by the United States army. I left Europe for South America with the war photographs that I’d seen, and with my head full of images of America—hence my constant need to represent both worlds in my photographic practice.

Berti: You lived in Cuba between 1961 and 1965, after the revolution. You photographed with Alejo Carpentier, the renowned Cuban writer, and published the book La ciudad de las columnas (The city of columns, 1970). What drew you to Cuba?

Gasparini: On the one hand, there was an interest in modernity, beauty, folklore, and the authenticity of American life—in magical realism. In 1958, on the other hand, the Cuban Revolution had exploded as a response to the deep social problems that existed in Cuba and the rest of Latin America. The Cuban architect Ricardo Porro and Alejo Carpentier—both exiled in Venezuela—invited me to visit Cuba. I went with Franca; we were married by then. We intended to stay six months but the trip was extended to four and a half years. Carpentier wanted to write a book about Havana, an archive of baroque Cuban architecture—that’s what became La ciudad de las columnas. He liked my “walking” work, he said, because I passed through all of the city streets, registering the stained-glass windows, hallways, and gates. I also befriended many of the fervent supporters of the first revolutionary wave.

Berti: Following the parties celebrating the Cuban Revolution, you shifted the content and style of your photographs, focusing on people living in poverty.

Gasparini: Yes, the speed of the social and cultural events in Cuba made me change my camera. I switched from medium- and large-format reflex cameras (which I used thanks to Strand) to a versatile 35mm, which obviously changed my way of seeing and capturing reality with tremendous speed. I became part of the artistic and intellectual circles, which included photographers, filmmakers, and architects such as Santiago Álvarez, Alberto Korda, and Iván Espín. In Havana I also met Cartier-Bresson, René Burri, Chris Marker, and Italo Calvino, all formidable intellectuals. This amplified my desire to expand the discourse of the Cuban Revolution throughout all of Latin America.

Berti: How did your Cuban themes differ from those in your other Latin American work?

Gasparini: In Cuba I documented the celebration, euphoria, triumph, and hope following the revolution. In the rest of Latin America, I documented social contradictions.

Berti: When did you begin to expand your travel around Latin America?

Gasparini: In 1970, UNESCO hired me to photograph pre-Columbian, colonial, and contemporary edifices. I focused on the urban building projects being erected from Mexico to the Pampas, from Brasília to Machu Picchu, designed by great modernist architects. I insisted on photographing the lives of marginalized individuals, of those who have nothing, and the huge differences that coexist beside and around these huge building projects.

Berti: In addition to the book Panorama of Latin American Architecture (1977), you published the book of photographs Para verte mejor, América Latina. How did this project materialize and where did the title come from?

Gasparini: It came from an eagerness to document Cuba once again. Edmundo Desnoes wrote the text and Humberto Peña designed the book. The title paraphrases [Charles] Perrault’s story “Little Red Riding Hood” (1967).

Berti: Tell me about Retromundo (Retroworld, 1986), your second book, which was about the representation of two worlds, Europe and Latin America. Here you juxtapose two ways of life: that of the inhabitants of Paris, New York, and Rome, and that of citizens in São Paulo, Mexico City, and Lima.

Gasparini: As I told you earlier, I left Europe with images of America. Later on, I returned to the first world carrying images of the Latin American reality. That’s where Retromundo came from—a book of photographs that doesn’t confront realities but rather tries to serve as evidence for what’s occurring on both continents.

Berti: And El suplicante (The supplicant, 2010)? Where did you get the idea of structuring a book according to your long travels through Mexico?

Gasparini: El suplicante was another adventure. I was invited to develop a project based on the urban culture of Mexico City. I took a photographic tour from the border of the northern imperialist to Subcomandante Marcos’s land of Chiapas.

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Berti: And your most recent book, Karakarakas [wordplay on Caracas that incorporates the “ka” sound from the words Kodak and Kafka] (2014), takes the form of a political manifesto about the city.

Gasparini: That book brings together photographs taken in Caracas between 1954 and 2014. I put together these photographs with il senno di poi, “the wisdom of hindsight.” I combined images, connecting them with different themes, places, and dates, in an attempt to organize a new discourse that—by way of architecture and certain aspects of daily urban life—would offer a reinterpretation of Caracas’s past and evolution, representing its social, political, and cultural contradictions. As in the previous books, I worked with a great team. The book managed to give significant shape to a politically urgent discourse on the circumstances Venezuela currently endures, from the incongruences of the Bolivarian Revolution to the so-called socialism of the twenty-first century. I also tried to reflect, through architecture, on daily city life in this country that’s so wealthy with oil and yet so poor—a failure of modernity—and on the empty commitments of the governments preceding Chávez.

Berti: You also include images of the last sixteen years, which comprise the Chávez and post- Chávez years (1999–present). Looking at Karakarakas, it seems that the situation has not advanced. We see no changes, and the misery and poverty continue.

Gasparini: Chávez was the product, precisely, of a nonworking democracy. He wanted to put an end to the bourgeois government and built a populist state that ended up dividing the people. The result has been the destruction of modern society, economic ruin, and the collapse of basic services: health care, education, work, among others. No one knows—nor can define—the economic, political, and social chaos we’re suffering.

Berti: In your Fotomurales (Photo-murals), which you began in the ’90s and are still working on, and in the series Epifanías (Epiphanies, 1980s–90s), you use audiovisual narratives. Why use an audiovisual component in a photography book project?

Gasparini: This allows me to incorporate spoken or written texts—poetry, music, sound, and imagery. Above all, it allows me to add a temporal shift. For me, audiovisual is the most complex and all-encompassing medium. The form helps deepen what I want to express. There I find what the photograph on its own doesn’t provide—with its claim to replace the disorder of the world with the balanced order of the composition.

Berti: Since the 1980s you’ve been presenting audiovisuals together with slide-show projections, synchronizing three carousels of slides in a cinematic way. You orchestrated the projection in museums as well, as a sort of in situ performance.

Gasparini: The performance is important because, as the author of the project, I am present. The projection allows me to establish a dialogue with the public. Before projecting the piece, I can insert or extract images and organize a loose discourse, one that’s mutable and changeable, different with every projection.

Berti: You have often framed writing in your photographs, be it publicity slogans or graffiti. Do you feel that the image is not significant in and of itself?

Gasparini: The image on its own nailed to a wall doesn’t interest me. My interest has always been to edit images in the same way as words or discourse. From a fleeting image I like to develop visual phrases.

Berti: In the series Fotomurales, in some of the audiovisuals (early 2000s), you appropriated the revolutionary iconography of the continent, depicting Che or Tina Modotti; you uplift heroes who were dedicated to the Cuban dictatorship, as in Che’s case. Is this a way of remembering or refreshing a political position?

Gasparini: What you’re asking corresponds with a specific moment and context in recent Latin American history. In the ’60s and ’70s, there wasn’t a single place in South America that hadn’t been invaded by a political or advertising message, to the point where Coca-Cola and Che both became hypercontaminated icons in Latin America’s cultural memory.

Berti: In Modotti’s case it seems more like a romantic relationship.

Gasparini: Tina is special. She was born in Udine, a city close to Gorizia, my native city. When I was very young, Strand spoke to me of her, describing her as a great heroine of the revolution and an extraordinary photographer. In Mexico, I was a friend of [Manuel] Álvarez Bravo’s, who studied, worked, and helped Tina with her Mexican ordeal, so full of betrayals. Edward Weston’s journals speak of Tina, and for years his journals were by my bedside. In addition, Tina was beautiful and her photography was beautiful. Tina is another love in the journey of my life.

Berti: You developed your photography practice in close collaboration with the women you shared your life with.

Gasparini: I’ve been lucky. With the women I’ve loved I’ve had relationships filled with complicity and mutual interests. They were all intelligent, passionate, curious about photography, and shared my concern for social equality. Franca was a great partner; she helped me with my lab work. Duda Ferrari, an Italian architect, complemented my architecture work and designed several political publications in Caracas in the 1970s. With María Teresa Boulton I began a project of promoting photography as art in Venezuela, through the Fototeca gallery (1977–82), later the Venezuelan Council for Photography. Finally, with Marianela Figarella, an intelligent and passionate researcher, I shared ideas about photography as art and cultural product.

Berti: You still take pictures. Why?

Gasparini: In the end, after so many journeys, I believe there are some images that “bite,” or pierce you, as Barthes notes. I think photographs can help us learn how to look. How to think about and resist this world that’s consecrated to the grandiloquence of symbols that propagate lies and that, more and more, reduce and undervalue life.

Berti: How do you view the relationship between politics and photography?

Gasparini: Whether the formalists and Conceptualists like it or not, the image—the photograph—is a product of ideology. What is captured is in the mind of the person who triggers the shutter. Photography is the result of a thought process; it’s a serious subject. It’s not a click made with, say, a smartphone for uploading photographs to Instagram or Facebook.

Berti: Why take a political stance?

Gasparini: As Georges Didi-Huberman, a popular philosopher among the young Venezuelan Conceptual artists, says, “In order to know, you have to take a position. To take a position is to want, is to demand something, is to situate oneself in the present and aspire to a future.”

Berti: What do you think about being considered a Latin American photographer?

Gasparini: I’m eighty-one years old. I’ve lived for sixty years in Latin America and twenty in Italy. I’ve lived between two worlds and I travel frequently. Obviously I consider myself a Latin American photographer in the sense that my work is connected to the social and cultural events of the continent.

Berti: Is there such a thing as Latin American photography?

Gasparini: If we locate photographic practice in a given territory, evidently Latin American photography exists, in the same way people speak of North American or Japanese photography. Photography has a history here: The second half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of travel photography and its stubborn depiction of the “other.” The first decade of the twentieth century included Agustín Casasola’s extensive and unprecedented coverage of the Mexican Revolution. The Cuban Revolution expanded the drive to photograph every corner of Latin America. During the Cold War, the medium was used by those we now call the “Conceptualists of the South” as a tool for dissent against totalitarian regimes, such as Pinochet’s in Chile.

Recently, Alexis Fabry curated the exhibition América Latina: Photographs, 1960–2013 (2013) at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and also organized Urbes Mutantes (Mutated metropolises, 2013–14), in Bogotá and New York; these were extraordinary exhibitions that covered a wide repertoire of photographs made in Latin America. Currently, many photographers work in the region, documenting diverse local realities, and they generate proposals that are comparable to those of photographers on other continents.

Berti: You’ve spent more than sixty years taking photographs. Do you have an opinion about contemporary photography?

Gasparini: Paul Strand, my teacher and friend, fought all his life for socialist ideals and for photography to be accepted in museums and purchased for its rightful commercial value. Now, in Latin America and in the rest of the world, socialism is dead or confined to museums. Photographs are sold at art fairs, veritable art supermarkets. Strand’s photographs sell for thousands at art auctions: they’ve gone for more than a hundred thousand dollars! It has all come to pass, cara Sagrario.

Translated from the Spanish by Elianna Kan and Paula Kupfer. This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 220, “The Interview Issue.”

An-My Lê was born in Vietnam in 1960 and came to the United States as a political refugee at age fifteen. She received a grant to return to her homeland just after US Vietnamese relations were formally restored. Lê went back several times between 1994 and 1997, creating stunning large-format, black-and-white photographs, expertly printed in a middle-gray scale reminiscent of Robert Adams. These images do not address the war specifically, but rather represent Lê’s attempt to reconcile memories of her childhood home with the contemporary landscape that now confronted her. The war haunts the images in eerie metaphors: dozens of kites double as dive-bombing planes; crop fires and construction sites recall napalm and mass graves.

In 1999 Lê began working with Vietnam War reenactors in North Carolina who restage battles as well as the training and daily life of soldiers—both Viet Cong and American GIs. For four summers, she not only photographed but also participated in battles of the Vietnam War restaged on her adopted American soil. Relating to both documentary and staged photography, the work is aesthetically rigorous and conceptually challenging. Soldiers at rest give themselves up to portraiture, while battle compositions recognizable from classic war photojournalism possess the qualities of a dream. Most recently, Lê has photographed exercises performed by the US military in the American desert in preparation for maneuvers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lê’s works elucidate the complicated nature of the aesthetics and spectacle of war. But perhaps the most intriguing conceptual component is Lê’s own relationship to the subjects and the landscapes she presents. —The Editors, from Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present (Aperture, 2018)

Hilton Als: For Americans born in the 1960s, Vietnam, or, rather, the “issue” of Vietnam—the “problem” of Vietnam—was something that we always lived with: on television, in newspapers, and the rest. But we did not necessarily understand what “the war” in Vietnam was about. Can you provide a thumbnail sketch of the historical and political background of your country, and the effect its invasions—by the French, by Americans—had on you, your family, and your environs?

An-My Lê: My mother’s family—much more dominant in my life than my father’s—was from Thai Binh, a small town near Hanoi. They lived through the Japanese occupation and under Communist rule. My mother grew up in Hanoi but for higher education traveled to Paris in the 1950s. In 1954, while she was still in Paris, my grandmother moved to Saigon when the country was divided at the 17th parallel and the Communists took over the North. My mother met my father and married him in Paris, where my older brother was born. They eventually returned to Saigon, where I was born.

We lived through many political coups, years of fear and uncertainty, as the Viet Cong would shell the city randomly every night. War became a routine, something we accepted as part of our lives, until 1968 when the Communists attacked Saigon during the Tet celebrations. They took over the American embassy and the radio station behind our house. This offensive sent shock waves through the community. We all felt vulnerable. My parents decided we had to leave Vietnam to find shelter, even if it was for a short while. Fortunately my mother received a scholarship to work on a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne. We were able to move to Paris (my father stayed behind) and lived there for five years while she completed her Ph.D. We returned to Saigon in 1973, only to see the country fall to the Communists in 1975. We were fortunate to be evacuated by the Americans that April. In spite of our ties to France, my parents decided to remain in the United States because it seemed to offer more opportunities at that time. For better or for worse, my life and those of the last three generations of my family have been underscored by the complicated political history of Vietnam.

An-My Lê, Untitled, Ho Chi Minh City, 1995, from the series Viêt Nam

An-My Lê, Untitled, Son Tay, 1998, from the series Viêt Nam

Als: Your photographs deal so specifically with ideas of landscape; do you work from your memory of the Vietnamese landscape to examine your feelings about it, or to imagine what its colonizers might have felt about it?

Lê: Over the years, disconnected from the place and with only a handful of family pictures available, I had come to construct my own notions of a Vietnam drawn mostly from memories, but also from photojournalism and Hollywood films. In 1994 when I returned for the first time, I realized that I was not particularly interested in reexamining contemporary Vietnam. Instead of seeking the real, I began
making photographs that use the real to ground the imaginary. The landscape genre or the description of people’s activities in the landscape lent itself well to this way of thinking.

My attachment to the idea of landscape is a direct extension of a life in exile. The sense of home has to do with the importance of food and location, and it is all connected to the land. Vietnam has always been (and still is somewhat) an agricultural society. Its culture and history are deeply rooted in its land. Growing up I did not know much of the country, actually not much outside of the capital and a few other large cities in the South, since it was difficult and unsafe to travel to the countryside during wartime. Especially when we lived in Paris and later in the U.S., I came to fantasize about this traditional agricultural way of life. Through folktales, legends, and many stories I heard from my mother and grandmother, I imagined a life that was truly magical but at the same time real and grounded—a life of hardship, working the land, with threats of war and disease but also the joys of living close to nature in a large, close-knit family.

Vietnamese society and in a way its people (especially in the North but partly in the South as well) have also been deeply scarred by years of immobilization and deprivation during the war and during the earlier part of the reunification. In the meantime, in spite of the destruction, the landscape seems to have recovered and, to someone living in exile, has managed to retain and exude that sense of culture and history that can signal that one has arrived home.

The idea of the landscape and its climate was also such an important topic when the Vietnam War was covered in military analyses, news reports, and Hollywood films. The word terrain was often mentioned: how treacherous it was, how the enemy was better prepared for it and had a greater advantage. Working with the Vietnam War reenactors I became fascinated by the significance of the landscape in terms of its strategic meaning. Every hilltop, bend in the road, group of trees, and open field became a possibility for an ambush, an escape route, a landing zone, or a campsite.

In spite of the influence of Vietnamese culture on my life, I am also a product of colonial attitude, having grown up in a Francophile home and then later having lived in France. Eugène Atget has been a great inspiration—not only his work, which brilliantly captures the notions of change and transition in a place and a culture, but his entire life and working process.

An-My Lê, Untitled, Mekong Delta, 1994, from the series Viêt Nam

Als: When did you begin your career in photography? And why?

Lê: It began by chance. I never felt I had a calling for anything in particular but was fairly good in the sciences, so I chose to study biology in college in preparation for a career in medicine. I was not accepted to any of the medical schools I applied to in my senior year, and it was suggested that I do biomedical research, publish, pursue a master’s degree in biology, and reapply. While completing a master’s at Stanford University, I wanted to take a drawing class to fulfill a nonscience requirement. It was full, so I chose photography instead. To my surprise, the class completely took over my life. If I was not photographing, I was in the darkroom printing until late. I loved every minute of it.

What drew me at first was simply how the camera gave me license to go out and discover more of the world; it taught me about people and places and about myself as well. The immediacy of responding to a situation when you snap your photo, the opportunity to be more analytical later when you edit the pictures, and the blend of the intuitive and the cerebral was very satisfying. Whatever a calling could be, it seemed to me that this was it.

In 1986 I moved back to Paris, where I floundered for a few months until Laura Volkerding, my teacher from Stanford, arrived. She came to document the casting of Rodin’s Gates of Hell that had been donated to Stanford by Gerald Cantor. It was to be cast using the lost wax method at a foundry that belongs to a guild of craftsmen called the Compagnons du Devoir du Tour de France. The guild dates back to the Middle Ages and is comprised of various métiers: metalwork, masonry, stone-cutting, and carpentry/woodwork. These craftsmen were responsible for the construction of most churches and cathedrals in France. Now they do a lot of restoration work.

It turned out that the guild needed a staff photographer, and Laura referred me. I spent the next four years touring France and working for them. I was completely unprepared for the demands of this job; I quickly learned how to use a view camera on my own, how to use color film, how to light a space. I underwent a lot of trial and error. It was a great opportunity for me to travel and learn about the art and architecture of France, but more importantly, working for the guild deeply affected the way I saw things and represented them photographically. It was always about seeing clearly: showing the curve of a stairwell in an unencumbered way, the texture of this marble or that wood, drawing the volume of a vault in the most readable way. I also learned to respect the materiality of things (the nobility of stone, metal, and wood). I developed an appreciation of all things well made and a love for everything about the tradition of the craftsman and his work.

I moved back to the U.S., to New York City, in 1990. I finally realized that I did not want to be a commercial photographer and applied to graduate school. I then went to the Yale School of Art for my MFA. That’s when I began to grapple with the scope of a possible life as a visual artist.

An-My Lê: Small Wars

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The twentieth anniversary edition of An-My Lê’s acclaimed first book Small Wars, reissued with five new images and an afterword by Ocean Vuong.

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An-My Lê: Small Wars

Photographs by An-My Lê. Text by Richard B. Woodward. Interviewer Hilton Als. Afterword by Ocean Vuong. Designed by Andrew Sloat.

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Description

The twentieth anniversary edition of An-My Lê’s acclaimed first book Small Wars, reissued with five new images and an afterword by Ocean Vuong.

For the past three decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling. 

First published in 2005, Small Wars brings together three interconnected series. In Viêt Nam, Lê returns to the country she left in her teens and attempts to reconcile memories of her childhood home with the contemporary landscape; in Small Wars, she engages a small community of Vietnam War reenactors; and in 29 Palms, she documents the preparations of marines in the California desert as they undergo training for conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Taken together, this trilogy brilliantly presents a complexly layered exploration of the issues surrounding landscape, memory, and the representation of violence and war. 

With great precision and clarity, Lê is able to evoke the work of nineteenth-century landscapes as well as that of the New Topographics—but by weaving in her own personal narrative of refuge and return, she pushes beyond both to produce a uniquely revelatory body of work. The twentieth anniversary edition of Small Wars is a lush reissue of the original, with five additional images and a new afterword by Ocean Vuong, who discusses how these bodies of work resonate twenty years later.

Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 144
Number of images: 82
Publication date: 2025-05-27
Measurements: 11.75 x 8.75 x 1.5 inches
ISBN: 9781597115773

Press

“A seminal publication, Small Wars showcases Lê’s nuanced explorations of nationhood, landscape, memory and representations of conflict.”—Financial Times

Contributors

An-My Lê (born in Saigon, Vietnam, 1960) is a Vietnamese American photographer, filmmaker, author, and the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College. Lê came to the United States as a political refugee at age fifteen. She received a grant to return to her homeland just after US-Vietnamese relations were formally restored, and traveled there several times between 1994 and 1997. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation, and her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Most recently a major retrospective of her work was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is based in New York.
Richard B. Woodward was an arts critic whose essays on art and photography were featured in dozens of monographs, catalogs, and publications, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Atlantic, Bookforum, Film Comment, American Scholar, New Yorker, and Vogue.
Hilton Als is a staff writer and theater critic at the New Yorker. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, he is the author of The Women (1996), White Girls (2013), and Joan Didion: What She Means (2022). He is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University.
Ocean Vuong is author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) and Time Is a Mother (2022), and the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the American Book Award, he was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and is professor of creative writing at New York University.

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Als: After you began photographing, did you immediately establish long-range plans in terms of what you wanted to accomplish with it, such as your studies of the reenactors in “their” recreated Vietnam, or is it all a process of discovery?

Lê: It was all subconscious. I am rather amazed at how the three projects have come together as a sort of trilogy. Going into a project, I never know the photographs I will end up making. It is a process of discovery, and I try to stay as open-minded as possible. For me it is first about learning something about the world, about myself. It is a little frightening starting a project in such a way and not feeling prepared, but so much of it is about problem solving. I am always asking myself what it is I am trying to find out about the situation, about the people: What does it all mean in terms of a cultural and historical context? What are my personal issues here? What is the point? Is it worthwhile? What kind of photographs could attempt to broach and perhaps begin to answer those questions?

The Vietnam project happened in 1993 after graduation from Yale, where I had been encouraged to do work that was more personal and autobiographical. The U.S. was loosening its diplomatic and economic relations with Vietnam. I saw the opportunity to return to Vietnam, which is something we never thought we could do when we left in 1975. The question of war was not central to the photographs I made in Vietnam. Only at the conclusion of this project did I feel ready to tackle that issue head-on. I had to also ask myself: how do you address something that has happened so long ago? I felt stumped; other than working with press images or trying to memorialize the event, what could I do?

Some of what I did in Vietnam, where I learned how to place people in the landscape, prepared me for the subsequent series. I learned that it is all about scale. How far back can you go to get a great drawing of the land, while still being able to suggest the activity of the people?

Als: How did you find out about the “reenactments”? And what was your first response to them? Did you have to go through a great deal of bureaucratic rigmarole to gain access to photograph?

Lê: I had heard about these small, low-key groups of men who reenact the Vietnam War. After some research on the Internet, I found one group based in Virginia and contacted them. It was smaller and more exclusive when I first worked with them than it is now. Gaining an invitation to the first event involved a lot of back and forth emailing with the founder. Once I was there, it became a lot easier because it was clear I wanted to help contribute to the event as best as I could while making my photographs.

An-My Lê, Lesson, 1999–2002, from the series Small Wars

An-My Lê, Explosion, 1999–2002, from the series Small Wars

Als: Did you actually become involved in any of the war games that you documented?

Lê: Yes, that’s the requirement for attending the events, which last three days. The reenactors are obsessed with re-creating a situation that is seamless. So it is crucial that everything—from the erection of Viet Cong villages and GI firebases to a haircut and the smallest details in a uniform—be of the period. To fit in I often played a VC guerilla or North Vietnamese army soldier. I did what I needed to do to find the right VC uniform, sandals, rucksacks, and hammock. To go on the GI side, I would become a “Kit Carson” scout, a turncoat who would inform the Americans.

The reenactors truly enjoyed having me there. I added to the authenticity of the event, and they would often concoct elaborate scenarios around my character. I have played the sniper girl (my favorite—it felt perversely empowering to control something that I never had any say in). I have been the lone guerilla left over in a booby-trapped village to spring out of a hut and ambush the GI platoon. I have played the captured prisoner.

Initially I was terrified at the prospect of spending three days with these unknown men on a hundred- acre private property ten hours from New York City. My friend Lois Connor accompanied me. It turns out the reenactors are straightforward, conservative men who are so dedicated to this hobby. It’s an obsession for many of them—an obsession with collecting and trading all the paraphernalia, meshed with an interest in military history. Reenacting events are an opportunity for them to put their stuff to use, meet other men who share their interest, and live in a kind of virtual reality or travel back in time, all while having an adventure with their buddies.

From many conversations, I also learned that their interest in the military and in Vietnam stemmed from complicated personal histories. These men came from all sorts of professions. A few had been in the military, but rarely did they have experience in a combat situation. Some had missed their calling for the military and were steered by their parents toward law school or business school; some had
lost a brother in Vietnam. I met at least two men whose fathers had distinguished themselves in combat in Vietnam. It seemed that many of them had complicated personal issues they were trying to resolve, but then I was also trying to resolve mine. In a way, we were all artists trying to make sense of our own personal baggage.

Als: How did you develop the topic of the third series?

Lê: In 2002 and 2003 the U.S. was gearing up for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan just as I finished working with the reenactors. I was extremely distressed the day the war began in March 2003. Strangely enough, my heart did not go out immediately to the Iraqi civilians, but to our troops. I first thought of the scope and impact of war on them and their extended families. I am not categorically against war, but I feel the decision makers and policy makers have no idea how devastating the effects of war can be. Remembering my own experience, I also felt completely vulnerable. War just seemed unreasonable and unjustified in this case.

Trying to make sense of all this, I decided I had to find a way to go to Iraq. It was, unfortunately, too late to become embedded. I came across a photograph of the Marines training in the California desert in 29 Palms that looked just like parts of Afghanistan and Iraq. I immediately knew this place held great potential for a new project. Working there would follow with the idea of the reenactment and training for something. I was also drawn by the concept of simulations that are once removed but allow one to see and understand the real thing with clarity and perhaps more objectivity.

Once I began photographing at the Marine Air Ground Combat Center in 29 Palms, it became obvious that my pictures stand in complete opposition to combat photography. We are dealing with parallel subjects, but the outcome—the meaning—is completely different. In the case of combat photography, the die is cast. The photographer is thrown into a conflict where his work is about capturing the action or the aftermath. Chaos, he horrific violence of the moment, and the obvious risk incurred by the photographer in this situation all play into producing an image with a brutal if not blinding immediacy. Conversely, working with the military in training allows for breathing room. What jumps out for me is the way in which the magnitude of the firepower used—from artillery weapons to mortars, C-4 explosives, and air-delivered bombs—and its destructive potential, becomes muted and transformed as it is photographed in these exercises in the middle of a tranquil desert. One can then step back and ponder the larger issues of war. For me the question is not only are we militarily ready, but also are we politically, morally, and philosophically prepared? No, we are not. This project is an impassioned plea for a much-needed consideration of the consequences of war.

An-My Lê, Mechanized Assault, 2003–4, from the series 29 Palms

An-My Lê, Colonel Greenwood, 2003–4, from the series 29 Palms

Als: Have you looked at a great many war photographs? And do you agree with many photography critics when they say that photographs of war “depersonalize” pain? By working with “staged” coups and so on, does that distance Vietnam for you?

Lê: I am a great admirer of the nineteenth-century war photographers, but I also respect the more contemporary ones: Robert Capa, Larry Burrows, James Nachtwey, Gilles Peress, Tyler Hicks. I have studied the work of many North Vietnamese combat photographers. In a way I feel closer to them and the nineteenth-century European photographers because of the importance they give the landscape in their work.

I do think the current photos of war from Iraq and Afghanistan (except for the Abu Ghraib pictures, which were not made by professional photographers) are a lot more tame and feel more glossy than anything ever made in Vietnam, but it’s also true that our hearts are colder these days from having been bombarded with one agonizing and horrific picture after another. In the end I think it is the cumulative effect of the images over time that will have as much effect on us as the single image of the young Vietnamese girl burned by a napalm bomb.

What are the effects of war on the landscape, on people’s lives? How is war imprinted in our collective memory and in our culture?

The more contemporary photographs that capture the immediate moment certainly convey the devastation and pain, but they are usually so horrific one has to turn away in shock—they go more to your gut than to your head. In the end these photographs certainly remind us we are at war, but how thought provoking are they?

I am more interested in the precursor to war and its psychic aftermath. There is something about addressing the preparation for war or the memory of war itself that allows one to think about the larger issues of war and devastation. Again, how prepared are we? And what are the effects of war on the landscape, on people’s lives? How is war imprinted in our collective memory and in our culture? How does it become enmeshed with romance and myth over time (i.e., for Hollywood and for the reenactors)? My concern is to make photographs that are provocative in response to the reality of war while challenging its context.

Als: Of course, all photographs lie. I consider pictures to be metaphors for actual events and the people in them. For me, photographs capture something—an essence—of an event or a person, but selectively. Given the pictorial and emotional scope of your work, how do you set about capturing such a large portion of our collective political history?

Lê: Great landscape photography has a literal but also a metaphorical scope to it (Atget, Robert Adams, etc.). There is something about seeing people’s lives (or the suggestion of it) splayed across a landscape that can be breathtaking and unforgettable. There is no escaping the specificity of photography, but I aspire to achieve a certain lyrical objectivity. It is more about patterns of behavior than the specificity of it, which perhaps allows for a larger understanding of history and culture. August Sander and Judith Joy Ross manage to do this through portraiture. Here it is landscape photography that gives me that opportunity. It allows for descriptive possibilities. You can ascribe character to a landscape; you can suggest its usage. It is like a stage and, most importantly, I try to not let the people and their activities completely take over.

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Als: Why do you shoot in black and white? And what kind of camera do you use?

Lê: I always consider all possible tools at the beginning of a project (color or black-and-white film; small-, medium-, or large-format cameras). But so far, the 5-by-7-view camera has been my tool of choice, in spite of its inconveniences. It provides a great large negative full of details. It allows for a certain clarity and descriptive sharpness. Above all, in an image from 5-by-7 negatives or larger, one can sense the volumes of air moving between things and inside spaces. I tend to prefer black and white because I am very interested in the way things are “drawn.” This is much more apparent in black and white, where the palette is reduced simply to black, white, and various shades of gray. The world as seen in black and white also feels one step removed from its reality, so it seems fitting as a way to conjure up memory or to blur fact and fiction. Most of my memories of the Vietnam War, aside from what I witnessed firsthand, derive from black-and-white television news footage and black-and-white newspaper images.

The 5-by-7 view camera is very clunky because of its size, weight, numerous accessories, and the need for a tripod. You can’t work that spontaneously. All shots have to be somewhat premeditated and directed, especially those involving people, because of slow shutter speeds and delay between framing the image and closing the shutter/cocking the lens/exposing the film. A lot of this accounts for the pictures in all my projects seeming staged. There were situations where I had to photograph what was in front of me, but there were also times when I had an idea and went about constructing the scene from scratch (using the setting and prop of choice, choosing the people, and directing them). Working this way—either planning something from scratch or anticipating something before it happens—feels much more cerebral. We often say that photographers hide behind their cameras. In a way the view camera has provided me with multiple shields from the painful memory of war, while allowing me to come as close as possible to try to understand it.

Als: Some of your pictures look like film stills; have you looked at a lot of narrative and documentary films about Vietnam in preparation for your work?

Lê: If they resemble film stills, most are more in the vein of the establishing shots—those that situate everything. I have always looked at Vietnam War films. (Well, only starting in the mid-eighties—it was too soon and still somewhat too traumatic before then.) I was interested in seeing how something that I knew so well, something that affected me so deeply, was portrayed on screen. Watching these movies was also the only opportunity to get a glimpse of “Vietnam.” Even when another country or Chinese actors were used as stand-ins, any suggestion of the country, its life, and its people satisfied my curiosity (and tempered my homesickness and yearning). The Anderson Platoon, a documentary by Pierre Schoendorffer, and of course Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War, Platoon—the first three are my favorites. More recently, I have seen these movies with a completely different interest in mind. I am interested in the Vietnam of the mind. It’s fascinating to me how all these other countries (Thailand and the Philippines mostly) are stand-ins for Vietnam and how the landscape has become a character.

I have been paying attention to how the cinematography is used to conjure up the past. The idea of the period piece is an interesting conceit. Many people find the activities of the Vietnam War reenactors very disturbing. Comparatively, Hollywood’s obsession with the Vietnam War and its numerous, painstaking “reenactments” on film seem completely reasonable. For me the fascination lies in the dialogue these two worlds establish between experience and chaos versus memory and storytelling.

These days, young Americans are first introduced to the subject of Vietnam, the Holocaust, or World War II by movies like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, or Apocalypse Now, and only later (or maybe never) will they learn the hard historical facts in textbooks in a classroom situation. From the start, there is a blurring of fact and fiction that’s fascinating.

I draw my motivations for these projects from personal memories and from both a fascination and an aversion for anything that has to do with war and destruction, for the military, paramilitary fringe groups. Mix into that an interest in mediated images in popular culture—all of these influence the way my pictures look: they could be as much about my memory of GIs walking down Tu Do street in Saigon as an echo of the depiction of the Air Cavalry machos in Apocalypse Now. I consider my work an inquiry into the literal representation of things vs. depictions that live in popular imagination.

An-My Lê, Infantry Platoon, Alpha Company, 2003–4, from the series 29 Palms

An-My Lê, Night Operations VII, 2003–4, from the series 29 Palms
All photographs courtesy the artist

Als: How did you feel at the end of these various projects? Did you feel as if you had “come home” in a sense? Has this work helped you deal with your origins?

Lê: It’s interesting that you ask about “coming home.” I’ve been obsessed with that idea because it applies to the type of fieldwork I do as a photographer as much as it is relevant to the experiences of the refugee and the soldier. Ambiguity and contradictions—the conflict between expectations and memories—these are all built into the experience of coming home for a refugee, for a soldier (whether from a real or virtual battle), or even for a photographer. Whether it is a childhood abruptly ended or a violently murderous week-long siege during the battle of Khe Sanh, some of us are confronted with these intense life experiences. They’re defining experiences that echo throughout one’s life. Whether coming home, returning to the country of origin for the refugee, going back to civilian life for the soldier, one is compelled to construct a story for oneself and hopefully come to terms with what happened. In attempting to construct a coherent narrative, one must negotiate a contentious and sometimes contradictory terrain, reconciling one’s own experience with other people’s ideas of it and against general expectations. It’s about understanding how one’s experience fits into the larger scheme of things and finding a personal equilibrium within that.

And as a photographer, there’s another layer—I have a different relationship to memories than the refugee or the soldier because through the work, there is potential for tangibility. I am the type of photographer who is interested in the way things look and in letting that be my major story-telling device. In that pointed moment it allows one to raise pertinent questions and to ponder the larger issues involved.

Crudely, my work is about reconciling what I thought I was getting myself into and what is actually revealed to me in the field. It’s not about taking a specific stand, or dignifying something that is important to me—nor is it about exalting a specific cause I’m committed to or exploring a subculture in depth. I’m satisfied in simply addressing these subjects: Vietnam, the military and the glamour of war, cultural and political history, and small subcultures. Photography becomes the perfect medium for conjuring up a sense of clarity (if not necessarily the truth) in the midst of chaotic and polarizing subjects.

This interview was originally published in An-My Lê: Small Wars (Aperture, 2025) and anthologized in Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present (Aperture, 2018).

“I never thought I would be a filmmaker. It wasn’t something I ever planned,” Sofia Coppola recently told the Guardian. “I felt frustrated at art school. I had so many interests—design, photography, music.” By turning to film she no longer had to choose. The form allowed Coppola to engage all her passions, especially photography, which has been central to shaping her cinematic language. From Coppola’s debut with The Virgin Suicides (1999) to Lost in Translation (2003) to Marie Antoinette (2006), the filmmaker has turned to the history of photography for inspiration for the interiors, costumes, and atmosphere of her films. Storyboards, replete with photographic references, were key to Coppola’s most recent—and controversial—film, the Civil War–era The Beguiled (2017), for which she won the Best Director Award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Each of her six feature-length films is visually distinctive, and yet it’s possible to identify in all of them a directorial signature, one that might be characterized by visual calm and compositional clarity.

For Aperture’s summer 2018 issue, “Film & Foto,” writer Philip Gefter sat down with Coppola at her home in Lower Manhattan to discuss the influence of photography on her filmmaking. On the walls hung a number of framed photographs: a William Eggleston of a girl lying in the grass holding a Brownie camera; a Tina Barney from the series Theater of Manners (1997); a Lee Friedlander nude; an Andy Warhol polaroid of Tina Chow. These pictures provided clues not only about Coppola’s knowledge of photography, but also about the subtlety of her sensibility—and became a starting point for their conversation about the look and feel of film.

Philip Gefter: I wonder if you think that there is a tension between photography and film—the still image versus the moving image. Is photography threatened by film? Will video render the still image extinct?

Sofia Coppola: For me, photography and film are two totally different things. My filmmaking begins with images from photography, so I think of it as a starting point for making a film. I love photographs.

Gefter: Yes, I can see that by looking around the room. You mentioned, too, that you have a print upstairs by Helmut Newton of Charlotte Rampling, nude, sitting on a table; also, a picture by Larry Sultan of his father swinging a golf club indoors. So, obviously, you collect photographs.

Coppola: But not in a serious way.

Gefter: Did you study photography or film?

Coppola: I went to CalArts in the fine art program. I wanted to be a painter but I wasn’t good at it, and my teacher wasn’t encouraging, so I went to ArtCenter, in Pasadena, where I met Paul Jasmin, who taught photography. I sat in on his classes. Then I started spending time in Japan, where a kind of girly snapshot photography was popular in the early ’90s. A friend of mine had a magazine called Dune, and he would hire me to do little fashion jobs in Tokyo—snapshot-like pictures of my girlfriends. I never had the patience to learn very much technically, but I could take snapshots. That’s the extent of it.

Gefter: Your first film, The Virgin Suicides, was about teenage girls. How did you make the transition from taking snapshot- like photographs to making movies?

Coppola: Paul Jasmin encouraged me. He thought I had a point of view that was worthwhile, and Dad [Francis Ford Coppola] was always talking about writing. I wasn’t planning on being a filmmaker, but when I read Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides (1993), I loved it and thought I would try adapting it. I ended up writing the script and putting a book of visual references together—photographs—to show how I wanted to make the film.

Gefter: Where did the visual references come from?

Coppola: My relationship with photography started as a teenager in the ’80s, looking at fashion magazines. I would also go to art fairs with my mother. Mom encouraged me to start collecting photography because it was the more affordable art at that time. At one art fair, I first saw the photographs of Bill Owens—his series on suburbia—so when I started working on Virgin Suicides those Bill Owens pictures became a reference. I bought one print—an image of girls at a school dance with stars hanging from the ceiling. That picture was definitely in my mind when I worked on the film.

Gefter: And, so, the book of photographs you put together—how did you use it for the look of the film?

Coppola: I made these color-xerox books, which included Bill Owens’s photographs from Suburbia (1973); also ’70s Playboy photography, with the nature girl, soft style; and Eggleston colors. The story in the film is a memory, recreated in faded snapshots. I worked with Ed Lachman, the cinematographer, showing him photographs of what I wanted the film to feel like. That’s how I start every movie, sitting with the cinematographer and the art department, looking at photographs, and saying, “This is the look or feeling,” so everyone is informed by it. It’s always the starting point for me, the images.

Gefter: You and Harris Savides, the cinematographer, worked together on two films, Somewhere (2010) and The Bling Ring (2013). I heard you would come up with a master shot that was almost photographic: the camera didn’t move as a person walked through the frame.

Coppola: In Somewhere, it was a kind of exercise to make the most minimal movie we could make. We wanted the shots to be as simple as possible. The part I like least about filmmaking is coverage, where it becomes like a math problem to figure out all the camera angles and how they add up. You can have too many cameras and do too many shots out of insecurity, just to make sure you have the scene. So to be elegant and poetic—we were trying to be as simple as we could. I love it when the camera doesn’t move very much. For Somewhere, the first image I had in mind when working on that script was a Bruce Weber photograph of Matt Dillon in bed, and also a 1958 picture by John R. Hamilton of Clint Eastwood in bed having room service in a hotel room.

Gefter: Of course, Somewhere was about a young actor living in a hotel—the Chateau Marmont. And weren’t Paul Jasmin’s pictures also a visual influence for Somewhere?

Coppola: Yeah, Paul Jasmin has two books—Lost Angeles (2004) and California Dreaming (2010). He took a lot of photographs of young actors in LA, so the movie has that feeling, and the color—just being aware of that California sun, but in a faded way.

Gefter: Lost in Translation, which takes place in Tokyo, has a completely different look and feel. What were your source photographs for that film?

Coppola: The picture by Larry Sultan of his father standing inside golfing, or putting, from his series Pictures from Home (1982–91). There’s a scene with Bill Murray putting with a golf iron in the hotel room.

Gefter: Also Bill Murray sitting on the bed in his hotel room, which seems like a direct reference to another Sultan image, too.

Coppola: That one is very much like Bill sitting on the bed in the movie. So I must have had that in my mind.

I tape photographs right into the script, so when we’re shooting I have direct visual references.

Gefter: How about the look of Marie Antoinette, which is so different from your other films?

Coppola: Marie Antoinette was very fanciful, decorative, and elaborate; I pulled this photograph by Guy Bourdin as a Marie Antoinette reference. In the opening shot of the film, she is lying down like this, eating cake.

Gefter: It looks so much like the movie.

Coppola: Usually, I love not very saturated colors. That’s something in my films—I always want low contrast. But not always. It depends on the subject matter because when we made Bling Ring it was really garish, and it was this awful kind of Us Weekly subject.

Gefter: There’s a paparazzi aesthetic to Bling Ring, a kind of harsh light that seems appropriate to the subject matter—teenagers robbing celebrities’ homes.

Coppola: Appropriate to that world. That was the only film I shot on digital. Everything else has been on film. I feel like they’re two different media, digital and photographic film. Film just has a different quality.

Gefter: Can you talk about the difference in quality?

Coppola: You know, it’s funny, they always say digital can do the same thing as film, but to me it’s like the difference between acrylic and oil.

Gefter: That’s a good analogy. What about your most recent film, The Beguiled, which takes place during the Civil War? That was definitely shot on film.

Coppola: Oh, The Beguiled. Whenever I start writing, I think about the color palette and the way it looks, so I thought about going back to The Virgin Suicides with this kind of faded, gauzy blending, these girls all blending together, which reminds me of a very feminine, pastel world. I’m trying to think about actual photographs. Anne Ross, my production designer, and I looked at Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979) for the look of it.

Gefter: I know that you used mood boards in The Beguiled. Can you tell me what they do for you and how you use them?

Coppola: To me that’s the most fun and inspiring part, just to start putting images together that give me ideas for shots. I tape photographs right into the script, so when we’re shooting I have direct visual references. For The Beguiled, there’s an Eggleston picture of two girls talking on a sofa, in color, that I showed Philippe Le Sourd, the DP. I said, “This is what I had in mind for that,” and then we designed the shot from there.

Gefter: I love that you tape pictures to the script.

Coppola: They all have color printouts taped in.

Gefter: Do you think you’re more grounded in the visual than the verbal?

Coppola: Definitely. With everything, I’m definitely visually based. I can only remember things by where I see them. That’s what I like about filmmaking. It’s putting images together. I love making collages, so it’s an extension of that.

Gefter: The mood boards are collages.

Coppola: I know fashion designers use mood boards too, but mine start with making these little photobooks where the images kind of come together, and you can start to see the whole story. With The Beguiled, we had different boards for each section. There are three acts to the story. The first section is dreamy and soft and very feminine, and we wanted it to feel unthreatening so that you have no idea where the story is going or how it is going to turn. The last section gets more Gothic and dark and the angles are more extreme, with those white dresses and dark backgrounds. Anne had the idea of making the walls darker, so everything gets darker. When we make the boards, you can see the different sections of the movie and see where you’re going in the different acts. It helps because you’re shooting out of order, so you can bring up these boards on set, the collages, and they remind you of the tone of the part of the movie the scene is in.

Gefter: Does Anne make the mood boards or do you do it together?

Coppola: She put those together. I like to do that too, and if I’m working on a short—I did a little Cartier commercial—we make mood boards, and I can show people what I have in mind so everyone working on it gets it. There’s something about the sum total of all the images, and that’s what a movie is—grouping together these images and having an overall feeling. It helps the team working on it, too. I’m not a great photographer, but I like it when I get my pictures back and I can lay them out and make a collage or a book. I enjoy the layout part, so maybe it relates to my filmmaking—getting a feeling from the totality of all the images, as opposed to just one image telling the whole story.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 231, “Film & Foto,” summer 2018. Sofia Coppola: Archive was published by MACK in September 2023.

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Vinca Petersen didn’t set out to be a photographer. Her pictures began as a visual diary, documenting her leaving home at the age of seventeen, moving into a London squat, and becoming involved in the free party scene that blossomed across Europe in the 1990s. She has built up an impressive archive that records the techno-fueled raves and the lives of the travelers who organized them, but she started taking pictures primarily as a way of recording her own life, preserving her memories of the parties, memories which otherwise—as anyone who has danced all night will know—tend to become a bit blurry.

In the U.K., free parties grew out of the rave explosion of 1989, when crowds of up to twenty-five thousand people would gather in the English countryside for illegal all-night events fueled by MDMA and techno music. Although the primary impetus was hedonism, it developed into an exhilarating wave of mass civil disobedience in which Britain’s young briefly united and partied in defiance of the Conservative government, which throughout the 1980s had thrived on divide and rule. When the authorities finally realized this was a battle they couldn’t win and consequently relaxed restrictions on dancing and drinking, most of these revelers returned to the cities and to newly legal, all-night dance clubs. But a marginalized minority—with no jobs to fund expensive nightclubs, and a liking for the vagabond lifestyle—took to the road and continued putting on free techno parties in the countryside. They organized themselves as sound systems—a term taken from reggae music that encompasses DJs, rappers, huge speakers, and all of the technology needed to put on a party anywhere, indoors or outdoors.

Petersen had become involved in this scene while still in her teens in London. She did some modeling and as a result met the renowned fashion and documentary photographer Corinne Day, whose work had reacted against the gloss and artifice of the 1980s by exploring a different kind of beauty: young and edgy, but also awkward and flawed. The raw, personal style of Petersen’s photographs fit into this new aesthetic, and Day encouraged her to make more, giving her protégée film and even cameras. In 1994, when new, draconian laws were passed to suppress free parties in the U.K., most of the sound systems Petersen knew fled to mainland Europe. She followed soon after, taking her camera with her, and remained on the road for nearly a decade. Everyone in the free party scene had their own stories, their own reasons for staying on the move, from ideology to a simple lack of money to a yearning for freedom. Petersen enjoyed the lifestyle: “I liked the earthiness of it all, and the traveling. I loved the practicalities, like finding somewhere to park for the night, finding water, going to a new supermarket to buy food, and cooking together. For me it was about a desperate need for community, I think.”

Life on the road wasn’t easy. They wandered through France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany, banding together with other sound systems to put on huge parties in remote countryside locations in the summer, then separating to seek out smaller, more urban venues, such as empty warehouses, when the weather got colder. The travelers played what Petersen describes as a constant game of cat and mouse with the police. As a result, they were wary of outsiders, especially those taking pictures. Cameras were routinely confiscated at parties, or film was removed. Of the few pictures by other photographers that exist of this scene, most were taken surreptitiously, and seem distant. Petersen’s images, by contrast, have been taken by an insider. Working with small, inconspicuous cameras, she sometimes didn’t even look through the viewfinder before clicking the shutter; other times she’d leave a camera on a bar overnight and retrieve it in the morning to see what had been recorded.

The resulting pictures are intimate, warm, but also unflinching, celebrating the travelers without romanticizing them. Petersen shows the damage as well as the highs of drug use, the litter and destruction the travelers left in their wake, as well as the euphoria of their parties. It’s a time and place that already feels distant: a world without cellphones and distracting screens.

Petersen’s fellow travelers often criticized her for hiding behind a lens, saying that it stopped her from being fully present in the moment. “A photograph, especially if it’s not a digital one,” Petersen remarks, “is a recording of the moment for another point in time. I used to struggle with that. But then over the years, of course everyone started asking me for copies.”

Eventually she put together a book, No System (1999), going back on the road for another year in order to obtain permission from everyone featured before it was published. A second edition was published in 2020, and Petersen hopes that a new generation will see her pictures as a guide to an alternative way of life.

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