Over those long months stuck at home over the past two years, the pair immersed themselves in a mythical vision of NYC as portrayed by visionaries such as EB White, Gordon Parks and Alfred Hitchcock. “We had visited and fallen in love with the City before. But during this period of constant daydreaming, it became something of an obsession, like the ultimate form of escapism for the both of us,” they agree. They began making plans to visit New York as soon as they could. 

When they finally got there, however, their expectations and reality collided. “We felt exhilarated to have arrived, but we quickly realised it wasn’t the New York we’d imagined and over-romanticised. Instead, we found a city in recovery, once again picking up the pieces of a crisis.” For the next five weeks, the duo sought to capture the essence of a city they had dreamed up in their minds, and the reality that presented itself before them. Exploring the streets together, they photographed similar scenes, capturing the locations from multiple perspectives.

The resulting images are layered and dreamlike, with a richly cinematic feel. The reflections of tall buildings and blurred images of passersby create movement. We feel as if we are pacing along the street and stealing glances side by side with the photographers. Noticeable icons of New York such as the Empire State Building are present in the pictures too, but they often appear abstracted. Precedence is given to smaller moments, and the everyday denizens who inhabit these streets. 

“Where most people would see only an abandoned office building, or a lonesome mannequin standing in an empty store window, we chose to look for beauty instead,” they explain. “We sought to capture the unstaged and almost indefinable elements of the city, be they vague silhouettes of people, or the vast amount of colours, abstract shapes and poetic rhythms the city itself consists of. The result is a shared perception of a place that transcends time – and a deeply personal love letter to an endlessly magical city.” 

Van Rij and van der Leeuw often roam the streets together with their cameras, sometimes seeking their own images, and sometimes working together on commissioned projects. A City Fantastic, however, is their first personal work together. Now, they’re looking forward to future projects. “Since we are both mostly inspired by cinema, we’re planning to shoot our first short fictional movie in the near future,” they reveal.

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Born in 1970 in Stavanger, Norway, the photographer began drawing as a small child, and by his late-teens, was contributing editorial cartoons to his local paper. Although he grew up with a dark room in his home — built by his father, an amateur photographer — he did not take up photography as an artistic medium until later on. At 21, he enrolled onto a Cultural Studies degree at Rogaland University Centre in Oslo. “That’s when I switched over,” says Rødland, who later went on to study photography at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts. “My photography was closer to the artistic impulse than my drawings.”

Still, paintings and drawings provide a source of inspiration, or reference point, in Rødland’s process. “I always look to what painters do, while pushing for photography to constitute equally complex and layered visual expressions of—and statements for—our time,” says Rødland, in a statement provided by the gallery. Removed from the intrinsic here-and-now of the photographic medium, part of the success of Rødland’s images in igniting multiple emotions in his viewers lie in their timeless quality. “Photography is no longer a young medium. Like painting, it can help us empower the past and reconnect with the archaic, the living mystery.”

Torbjørn Rødland: More Than Tongue Can Tell is currently on show at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, until 20 February 2021.

As a multidisciplinary artist working in installation and collage strategies, Winant uses found imagery to create a setting that asks the question, ‘What does a free body look like?’ Her practice, one that is messy, alive and impeccably thorough, interrogates this idea with an intense and energetic curiosity. Her work exists as a continuum, with each project profoundly interrelated. “It’s an informative flow that amounts to a larger practice,” she reflects. “Notes on Fundamental Joy very much arrived through My Birth [2018], in that I was thinking about [the questions] – What does it mean and look like to build a family? What are women and feminist-centred worlds? What are women’s possibilities for representations therein?” 

“Their joy disarms me. They live without the threat of sexual violence and harassment. Occupying a body that is neither a weapon or a target.”

Notes on Fundamental Joy is her most recent book, published by Printed Matter in 2019. Seeking the elimination of oppression through the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us, Winant curates a visual manifesto using photographs from the Separatist archive, and explores notions of equivalence and safety, crucially examining how those experiences can be represented. Indeed, for these feminist, separatist communes, picture-making was at the centre of their liberation. The groups held workshops, known as Ovulars – a playful take on the etymological meaning of seminar, to spread seed, with ocular, connected to the eye – led by artist members including Tee Corinne, Joan E Biren, Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove, a poet and photographer respectfully, Clytia Fuller and Carol Newhouse. Together, they orientated women on how to use the 4Å~5 camera, how to develop film in their makeshift darkrooms, and how to publish their work. The camera became a tool for living. A visual strategy not just to reclaim how they were pictured and represented, but as an agent of radical optimism.

In these works, a camera often meets a camera, as tenderness plays out within the frame. Nude women photograph each other, together and in community; an astute reclamation of the inherent and problematic power dynamic of the medium. What is radical about these images is the ease with which their bodies move through space. Soft, untethered from shame and expectation, existing purely in each other’s loving gaze. “Their joy disarms me,” says Winant. “They live without the threat of sexual violence and harassment. Occupying a body that is neither a weapon or a target.” This potent redefinition of photography as a tool for collective rather than individual recognition feels dynamic in our current vernacular. As an artist who uses photography for all of its feminist potential, these photographs create a map for a world Winant was searching for but never knew existed.

In continuation of the exploration of these found families, Winant turns to physical closeness in her new body of work, Togethering. ‘Togethering’ is a word invented by the residents of womyn’s lands to describe the practice of living united. “The idea of being together as a political act founded in tenderness was really moving to me,” explains the photographer. “This was the genesis for the way I collected images, really thinking about bodies coming into contact with other bodies.” The resulting work is an immersive experience that seeks to translate the sensation of touch, with multiple lines of enquiry and concurrent impacts. Found images depicting bodies in protest, bodies making love, and bodies enveloped in paternal embrace; each experience bleeding into each other. “I’m trying to process pleasure,” says Winant. “How we account for, and represent the most ineffable thing. This deep internal state, and how it is teased up through being together and in the process of consuming each other, becoming one body.”

“The idea of being together as a political act founded in tenderness was really moving to me.”

Winant’s source material is vast. In this work alone, she gathered images from books and magazines on consciousness-raising, feminist healing practices, nudist colonies, the women explorers of Mesopotamia, civil rights liberation struggle and protracted lovemaking, to name a few. Many of the photographs are imperfect, scratched, stained and some scribbled over, which makes them all the more precious in Winant’s eyes. These are mounted together, with the shape and framing based on a mandala, a diagrammatic form that represents the cosmos. Each one unique, yet together building a constellation of touch, an open-ended potential of ‘togethering’. 

There are so rarely hero images in Winant’s work; she favours multiple frames on a single plane informed by the work of Joan E Biren. JEB, as she prefers to be known, spoke out about decolonising patriarchal seeing, a reimagining of compositional strategies as feminist. “In her work, there is a unanimous tenderness but also no privileging of one or the other,” says Winant. “It does feel like composition and design strategies can be politically salient, meaningful and informative as much as the aboutness of the images themselves.”

In the context of a global pandemic, the axis of ‘togetherness’ was further galvanised. The lack of intimacy and community affected us all in some way, and Winant’s project metamorphosed to validate those vital human experiences. “We all feel it in different ways, depending on our geo global contexts, but the ground is moving beneath us,” she says. “I’m interested by this in my work, but also my life and my consciousness. The power and efficacy of political movements are what happens when we see 100,000 people from above, taking to the streets and looking like a single ocean. It’s powerful in action and in its visual potential.” The world impresses itself upon us, and like many of us in this moment, Winant is reckoning with the impact of her output. “I see people who are so brave, putting their bodies on the fucking line,” she says. “As I look at the women who left everything behind to live on the land, I think, ‘Would I do that?’ I don’t think so. There is a romance with the prospect of demonstrative bravery, to use your body as a political instrument in service of progressive values. Bravery, when paired with imagination, is explosive. That’s at the heart of it all. I’m always driving towards that in my work.”

If the feminist imperative is to believe that a radically different world is possible, Winant’s work exists as its evidence, while also teasing out the contradictions that remain unresolved. Though utopic in aspiration, these communities were often exclusionary in premise, mirroring the lack of intersectionality still rife in feminist movements today. The work asserts that there is no single way to read a narrative into the project, it is both joyful and contradictory. It is continuous ongoing dialogue emboldened by imagining as a primary life force. Winant asserts, “Art is not here, in this project or across my life, a tool for resistance, but rather a method of documenting an idea.”

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Path of Pins is Ellinger’s visual interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood. “It’s just a tiny part of this larger process of retelling, but I want to show people that there is more than one variation of the fairy tale,” she explains. We all watched the Disney version, and may have read the Grimm, Perrault or Carter stories, “but we might not be aware that we can rewrite it too,” says Ellinger. “We don’t have to be determined by these female figures of the past.”

One of the key metaphors that Ellinger explores, and which titled her project, is the symbol of sewing. Sewing is traditionally seen as a feminine activity, and motifs of it recur in many fairy tales, such as Sleeping Beauty, The Six Swans and Little Red Riding Hood. In one of the earliest surviving renditions of Little Red Riding Hood, the cunning wolf asks the young girl: “Will you take the path of pins, or the path of needles?” The girl takes the path of pins, which Ellinger interprets as “the path which is not fixed”. The wolf takes the path of needles, and the girl escapes a cruel fate.

How can we evade destiny, and how can we find our own path? These are the questions that Ellinger wants to propose through her interpretation of this tale. “It’s about identity and belonging, which is connected to finding your own path, and where you want to go,” she says.

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New Talent

“Hugh Hefner ran his playboy empire from his bedroom in what the writer Tom Wolf described as a prison that was as soft as the heart of an artichoke. Now, we are all incarcerated in the heart of an artichoke”

Chanarin would have been working on a new project – a photographic survey of Britain, taking August Sander’s Citizens of the Twentieth Century as its start point. Sander envisioned his project as a comprehensive visual record of the German population; Chanarin was to embark upon a nationwide survey of contemporary society — until the pandemic halted him.

Sander never completed the project, however, he shot some 640 archetypes between 1920 and 1930. One of those images — the Painter’s Wife, which depicts the painter Peter Abelen’s wife, Frau Abelen, in shirt and trousers, hair slicked back, a cigarette gripped between her lips — provides a starting point for Chanarin’s new approach.

Mirroring the total number of images that comprise Citizens of the Twentieth Century, Chanarin will make 640 portraits of his wife — an “extended portrait”; “a daily and obsessive interrogation of the self”. The series will be incorporated into an installation at The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco (SFMOMA) later this year.

Below, Burgess and Chanarin reflect on the project, and their experience of collaborating at home during lockdown.

BJP: Where are you isolating, and how has the pandemic affected you?

Oliver Chanarin: I am isolated in my apartment in London Fields and teaching my class at the Royal Academy of Art in the Netherlands, which, like all university learning, has migrated online. The classes feel like watching standup comedy without a live audience: communication flows in one direction — outwards, from the speaker into a vacuum. We all work hard to keep a genuine sense of engagement alive, however, at the end of the sessions, I collapse with a new ‘pandemic era’ fatigue.

Hugh Hefner ran his playboy empire from his bedroom in what the writer Tom Wolf described as a prison that was as soft as the heart of an artichoke. Now, we are all incarcerated in the heart of an artichoke. Hefner combated fatigue by consuming large amounts of the dextroamphetamine and so, paradoxically, the man who never got out of bed did not get much sleep, as writes Paul Preciado in his brilliant essay, published in Art Forum, which considers what can be learned from the pandemic. 

How has working in this environment affected your practice? 

Chanarin: My initial response to the lockdown was a kind of panic attack. I was compelled to maintain a sense of visibility and productivity no matter how futile and irrelevant that seemed. However, I quickly began to resent this impulse, the intrusion on my family, and the isolation, which I have simultaneously experienced as something quite precious and profound.

I speak from a position of enormous privilege; that same isolation is nothing short of hell for the elderly who have been abandoned in care homes, the homeless, and those bodies outside of the parallel universe of the internet’s market bubble, or, conversely, the essential-workers brutally forced to operate in spaces of lethal risk without adequate protection — as Preciado notes, “Their forced mobility is also a type of incarceration”.

Fiona, what has been your experience of being photographed in the private sphere of your home, by your husband, during the pandemic?

Fiona Jane Burgess: Our house has turned into a bit of a playground, so we have taken advantage of that. Olly has been taking photos of me since the first day we met so I’m very comfortable being photographed by him, but, being in lockdown is such a surreal situation that it has taken on a whole new intensity.

I’ve found it liberating to explore different sides of my personality, which I would not necessarily show on camera normally. Because our house is a very intimate and personal space I’ve felt empowered to express the more vulnerable or confrontational sides of my character as the project has evolved. It is important that I’m not a passive subject but rather an active participant in these photographs.

Oliver, what would you be working on now if the pandemic had not happened?

Chanarin: I am at the start of a new project: a photographic survey of Britain, which asks, ‘What do the citizens of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, look like today?’, ‘How do we identify ourselves?’, ‘Who, and what, do we feel we belong to?’.

This is a nation-wide photographic project, which surveys the state of contemporary society and investigates the tangled nature of identity and citizenship. Over the next two years, I will work with a team of researchers, photographers, and writers, in cities, towns, villages, and communities, across the UK, to build a layered picture of our contemporary world of work and leisure, cultures and subcultures, through hundreds of individual photographs.

The legacy of the great German photographer August Sander, who documented German society throughout the Weimar Republic, inspired the project. Sander’s project is titled Citizens of the Twentieth Century and comprises portraits of individuals, couples and groups, organised into sections.

I was poised to make a start on the work the week that lockdown began, with an assignment in Wales, where I am working with the arts organisation Artes Mundi and the National Museum of Wales. However, like everyone else, I have not managed to leave my apartment.

Have you felt the drive to create, or has this been a time of self-reflection?

Chanarin: Like every parent with small children, I have mostly been caring for my children. However, just before lockdown, Hasselblad in Sweden sent me a beautiful camera, and it seemed like a crime not to use it.

Obviously, it has been impossible to implement the original plan for the project, above. This will go ahead as soon as lockdown ends, however, in the meantime, I’ve taken August Sander’s portrait of the Cologne painter Peter Abelen’s wife, the Painter’s Wife, as a starting point for the photographic study of my own wife, Fiona Jane Burgess, made during the lockdown in our home in London.  

Abelen invited Sander to create a portrait of his wife; the Tate Gallery’s website describes the image as follows: “With her short, slicked-back hair, collared shirt, thin necktie and trousers, Frau Abelen is presented as a distinctly androgynous figure. Her masculine garb and haircut, as well as the cigarette, held between her teeth, signal the defiance of traditional gender roles.”

And Fiona, has the experience of being photographed and collaborating on the project provided a form of self-reflection, particularly during a period that many people are describing as a time for reflection? And if so, how?

Burgess: It’s reminded me of the freedom that can be experienced when you allow yourself to play. It’s easy to curate our outward appearance to fit a certain model of how we want to be seen in the world, but this project rejects that.

My identity is fluid and constantly changing and evolving and this project embraces that. It’s made me think about how my body has a history to it and a story to tell and will continue to change over time.

For example, I have a huge scar on my stomach from surgery post-childbirth and this is the first time I’ve ever shown this scar to anyone other than my husband, so that feels uncomfortable but also somehow affirmative. If something feels confronting or exposing then it probably means it’s got too much power over you anyway.

What about Sander’s Painter’s Wife inspired you? How do your photographs reflect, and diverge from, the image?

Chanarin: The Painter’s Wife is one of 640 ‘archetypes’ photographed by August Sander in Germany between 1920 and 1930. Staring determinedly out at the viewer, Helene Abelen’s animated expression is unusual for a Sander portrait and falls somewhere between bravado and agitation.

The extended portrait, which I am working on of my wife, will ultimately comprise 640 images of one person and is evolving in a collaborative and playful spirit. There is a daily and obsessive interrogation of the self, which seems to ask, “who is this person? I do not think I’ve ever looked at her so closely!”

It is a process, which, perhaps, recalls the work of Sander’s contemporary Helmar Lerski more than Sanders himself.

And Fiona, has the experience of being photographed and collaborating on the project provided a form of self-reflection, particularly during a period that many people are describing as a time for reflection? And if so, how?

Burgess: It’s reminded me of the freedom that can be experienced when you allow yourself to play. It’s easy to curate our outward appearance to fit a certain model of how we want to be seen in the world, but this project rejects that.

My identity is fluid and constantly changing and evolving and this project embraces that. It’s made me think about how my body has a history to it and a story to tell and will continue to change over time.

For example, I have a huge scar on my stomach from surgery post-childbirth and this is the first time I’ve ever shown this scar to anyone other than my husband, so that feels uncomfortable but also somehow affirmative. If something feels confronting or exposing then it probably means it’s got too much power over you anyway.

How has working on the project during the lockdown, and in the context of the pandemic more widely with all its political and social implications, affected and shaped the work?

Chanarin: As Michel Foucault showed us, there is no politics without body politics; in the words of Preciado, “The most important thing we learned from Foucault is that the living (therefore mortal) body is the central object of all politics.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has alerted us to the relationship between state power and our bodies. Broadly, there have been two strategies imposed by governments, either the containment of bodies through social distancing and stay at home directives, or via the surveying of our bodies by testing, tracking, and tracing. What Yuval Noah Harari refers to as under-the-skin surveillance — in which the powers monitoring our online activities are less interested in what we are clicking than the temperature of our finger as it clicks.

I am not going to make any grand claims for these portraits of Fiona. However, I will say that this has felt like one of the most personal and intimate experiences of my working life, and that is a direct product of the lockdown and the political forces, which have shaped our response to the pandemic.

“If something feels confronting or exposing then it probably means it’s got too much power over you anyway”

The images will eventually be displayed within an installation at SFMOMA, which, inspired by the automated distribution centres of Amazon and other global online retailers, will comprise a mechanical apparatus that hangs and rehangs the photographs depending on visitors’ dwell time on each work. What significance will they take on in this context?

Chanarin: The full series of portraits will be presented as framed 8×10 prints, exhibited at eye height inside the gallery. As you mentioned, the installation is inspired by the automated distribution centres of Amazon, and other global online retailers, and has been designed and built in collaboration with the Hamburg-based collective, Neue Farben.

A mechanical apparatus will hang and rehang the photographs; moving along wall-mounted rails; sorting between stacks of portraits on the gallery floor, and transporting them on-and-off the wall for the duration of the exhibition.

At first, the works are displayed randomly, but, over the duration of the exhibition, the apparatus tracks visitors in and out of the gallery and monitors dwell time — the microseconds each visitor spends looking at a specific work. Images that receive more attention will be displayed more often and for longer. Only a fragment of the archive will ever be displayed, and what the audience sees, and does not see, is the result of what others have seen, given attention to, or ignored.

Mediated by the apparatus, my photographs are no longer just images to reflect on, and experience, but rather a means for gathering behavioural data in the gallery. It is an installation that reflects on our everyday experience of images online, in which our attention is claimed as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales. In the ‘attention economy’ images accrue value through views, and attempts to quantify our attention have turned human behaviour into the most valuable natural resource on earth.

A product of this unprecedented period of lockdown and social distancing, I hope the work can address the next taxonomy at the heart of surveillance capitalism; drawing alarming parallels to the work of August Sander – the physiognomy and the archival impulse at the heart of the photographic medium.

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@oliverchanarin

2020 is available to purchase here.

The urge to photograph flesh derives from two aspects of my practice. Firstly, most of my subjects are humans — they are fleshy by nature. The second is a more visceral relationship I have with its texture. I am also an oil painter, a medium I have always regarded as akin to the flesh. Whether I paint to evoke the image of human flesh, or I photograph skin to evoke painterly aesthetics, I’m unsure.

My background in painting helps me see flesh as a malleable and living medium. Sunlight allows the true tones of skin to shine and become rich in a natural glow, as opposed to studio lighting and flash, which tends to flatten and dampen its vitality. Sun adds such plumpness and translucency to the skin as though it is feeding or quenching it. “Visceral” always brings a certain sexiness and richness of colour to mind; the flesh is the perfect instrument to make those connotations of the word explicit.

I like to think that the images of flesh in my work make people hungry or horny. It is a carnal thing, to enjoy flesh, isn’t it? For instance, when you look at a plump baby’s leg and have an urge to bite into it. I would like to remind someone of those urges.

I see flesh as personal — fused and internal: an organ that is only political by the actions of the person that it is attached to, or those viewing it and their actions. Human contact is a conscious thing and carries far more negative weight than it ever has during the lockdown. It is sad, as touch is a beautiful thing. To remove the humanity and inclusivity, often offered through touch, from daily life seems sterile and hostile.

During the lockdown, I have almost totally stopped looking in mirrors at my skin’s flaws — any spots or scars — mainly because the only person looking at me is my partner. He can look for anything harmful or unusual, but that would be all, as I no longer feel the need to adhere to daily beauty standards. With isolation comes a lack of self-awareness I am finding quite enjoyable.

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